site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).

At work I use C++ Builder / RAD Studio which makes for ridiculously quick & easy creation of native Windows apps for most any level of UI sophistication, using the VCL windows-wrapper library. Or they have a different library which supports cross-platform native from one codebase. And other than c++, their other language for the same product is Delphi, which I think may be more popular particularly among hobbyists. I'm not a fan of software getting more bloated and laggy in general, so I definitely appreciate the native snappiness.

Most people don't even know these still exist from back in the 90s, when they were Borland turbo pascal & c++ builder, after microsoft poached all those borland engineers to go on to make c# and .net. So it's not exactly the best career choice, if that's your angle. But they are still keeping up with the times, and made a free community version of the otherwise expensive IDE.