Ask HN: What Toolchains Are People Using for Desktop App Development in 2025?
This got me thinking: My own experience with desktop development dates back to the late 90s using Turbo Pascal 6 in Delphi, and I'm out of the loop on modern practices. With the evolving landscape, I'm curious about what tools and workflows developers are actually using today.
Some questions to spark discussion:
- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives?
I'd love to hear from folks with recent experience—success stories, pitfalls, and recommendations would be great. Thanks in advance for sharing!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44841291
Before that, handling files in the browser was cumbersome. You had to offer download and upload links for users to manage files. And handling whole directories was impossible.
But now web apps are like native software tools that you can use to edit and manage files on the file system.
And the bonus point is that what you build this way is fully functional on mobile too. Right away, without any changes. At least on Android.
I wouldn't really recommend a career out of it.
Care to say why? I ask because that's what I use at work: C++ and Qt
Yes, I'd prefer Rust and Slint/Tauri.
But like a prostitute I don't do what I love, I do what pays the bills.
I do like working in it, though!
Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support.
Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#.
https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
<3
Quite good, I've been building this Pomodoro:
https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/
I've also used nix to build the packages when possible.
One of the things I like about slint is that it has native components. They also have experimental support for Android and iOS.
The language is quite simple as well. Though it could benefit from something like flex
I think it would be possible to have those advantages in JUCE/C++ without a webview tho. Maybe just moving to a declarative UI approach for positioning and styles with the ability to refresh (something like litehtml could be handy for that)?
With that being said, I'd like to try the modern .NET stack sometime. Shame that the UI side of things is still largely Windows-only, and even Microsoft themselves don't know which UI framework they're using this week.
Rust + Egui for special cases like DAW plugins.
Still supported in latest .net versions.
Been developing mobile apps for over 15 years. This is by far the best stack for developing mobile apps. Speed, total control, native UI's. Love it.
I've been using Visual Studio Code and Github Copilot together, and it seems to work ok. I've not used it heavily, though, as I'm retired.
Would consider flutter for smaller apps as I had a great experience before.
Rust as a statically linked library where it makes sense.
For Mac only: new apps use Swift, legacy ones use Objective-C, both with AppKit.
Linux only: these are quite rare and there is a broad mix of them: C++, Java, etc.
Cross-platform: C++ with Qt seems to be the standard. Go and Rust seem to be rising. Rising UI libraries are Tauri, Slint and Iced. There are other alternatives like cross-platform .Net, Java or Flutter. But they don't look very solid and widely adopted.
Then there are other UI frameworks for some specific use cases (games, scientific applications, etc).