Sorry for the somewhat noob question, but how do you pick a library for making a GUI for your apps? My background is in physics, so most of my programming is perfectly find with a CLI that outputs a graph as a ps file or some csv. I am looking to learn about making some neat little GUIs. I was thinking it would be a good idea to try and build my GUI out of the browser so that my app can be as portable as possible, but does this mean it has to be in Javascript or can the backend be done in anything else?

I am not really sure what I am asking, but wanted to get a feel for how people approach front ends.

Thanks :)

  • 31337
    6·
    3 months ago

    I (probably unreasonably) despise using web front-ends for desktop applications.

    GTK is OK. QT is very feature rich, but that adds complexity. Both can be cross-compiled to most systems and shipped with all the required libraries pretty easily.

    I haven’t used it in a long while, but I remember liking Java Swing for some reason. Java should be “write once, run anywhere.” But, cross-compiling isn’t usually too hard, so not sure how much that matters. There’s more modern frameworks for JVM-based languages now, but I haven’t tried them.

    I’ve noticed Gradio is popular in the ML community (web-tech based, and mostly used for quick demos/prototypes).

    Edit: For web applications, I prefer Angular’s more traditional architecture over React’s hook architecture.