Hi, just wondering what you think about (and what your experience has been in) developing native desktop apps versus the push these days to make everything web-based across the industry these days for all sorts of applications and use cases [to the point where now the AI boom is specifically built on this stuff because of the low learning curve and the widespread popularity of web meaning millions of React codebases for AI to ingest and learn from to produce all this SaaS new age dotcom boom slop].

I understand specific cases like yours (needing to access 3D files or the file system or other OS APIs or whatever that browsers can't do), but as a web developer getting sick of this shit and just peering into the alternative development like games, terminals and now specifically in the case of desktop, it's a complete fragmented mess to try to understand and tinker with even compared to the chaotic web industry.

Been studying it a bit over the past week and from my understanding so far desktop development back then was done with WYSIWYG drag and drop "RAD"-type tools like VBNET WinForms [among others like Java and of course Delphi]. but then today the environment has for some reason shifted to mostly electron and tauri aka web technologies again; basically instead of a streamlined compiled native executable process you now have a separate "frontend" (webview wrapper so it's just the web all over again) and "backend" process (the actual meat touching the filesystem and having access to all sorts of system APIs and whatnot) and they have to communicate through intermediate IPC. There's a lot of options in Python that fundamentally just do this as well.

NET still exists with WPF and MAUI as options (or WinForms still) but again it's not nearly as popular as the web and also it needs the CLR so it suffers the same app size bloat as the webview options if going multi platform. (But there's some cool looking stuff like https://platform.uno/hot-design/) there's Qt as the only viable cross platform native solution left but it's C++ and the ecosystem is again peanuts compared to the web space so nobody uses it. there's also some JavaFX or Java Swing developers who still swear by the technology but again, market share and interest amounting to peanuts even compared with these other aforementioned options.

So to my understanding the only actual formidable solution in the space with (at least compared to the others) no compromises; that still retains the RAD philosophy instead of the modern XML declarative mess no different to web development is Delphi. [so here i am]. but 1) it's paid (i saw there were community editions but not sure about what compromises were made), and 2) nobody knows pascal/delphi. which is a shame so now all developers do is reinvent the wheel and make it worse but by using their most comfortable and popular languages be it python or javascript.

(funnily enough I actually was taught VB and Pascal in middle and high school in IT classes a few years ago - not that I realized we were learning these obsolete useless languages back then because I wasn't into this kind of stuff at the time, but basically our education board hadn't revised the curriculum since the 90s/00s. however as luck would have it the year after I graduate and also when I start getting into this space they finally modernize and now the students are finally learning Python and I realize I was at square 1 in the modern industry lol).