this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.

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[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago
[–] spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

I feel like that meme works here:

You: Don't use Claude because it's Electron.

Me: Don't use Claude because it is AI related.

We are not the same.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 2 points 13 hours ago

because we've lost native

Speak for yourself.

[–] HetareKing@piefed.social 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have no dog in this race as far as Claude is concerned, but this is pushing a false dichotomy. Not using, say, WinForms or something, because it's too limiting or because you don't want to make a unique UI for every platform, doesn't have to mean strapping an entire web browser to your frontend, there are plenty of other options.

The reason frameworks like Electron are popular is that we've spent a long time hammering a square peg into a round hole and there are now a whole bunch of tools for designing on top of web technologies and a lot of designers with experience with those tools. And of course, the fact that code can be reused between the web app and the desktop app helps too. But it does have a performance cost. The fact that you can have poorly performing and bloated native UIs too doesn't change that no matter how well-optimised your HTML+CSS+JS is, you can create something of the same complexity that is faster and leaner using native widgets. And when people opt for the desktop app instead of web app, they typically want something that performs better than the web app.

[–] GraveyardOrbit@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What alternatives are there, Tauri is basically the same thing but lighter

[–] themusicman@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] GraveyardOrbit@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 hours ago

(Reductionist take) Qt is just win forms but more modern

[–] beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

OpenCode is written in JS and uses Bun. Eats ram and crashes everyday.

[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Codex is written in Rust, as it should be. It even has readline integration, so you can do ctrl-j to insert a newline! :D

edit: ah dangit, this is about the desktop app. Nevermind.

[–] baod_rate@programming.dev 3 points 8 hours ago

Still relevant because claude's CLI (which is actually more of a TUI) is built on react