I’m looking for a programming language that can help me build a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux that’s not big but not small either. Additionally, I’d like to be able to build a website with the same language. I’ve been considering Ruby, Python, Golang and JavaScript. Python seems to be mainly used for scripting and ai, so I’m not sure if it’s the best fit. JavaScript has a lot of negative opinions surrounding it, while Ruby sounds interesting. Can anyone recommend a language that meets my requirements?
C#. Or Python if you must. Don’t use Javascript.
Most people use JavaScript for this nowadays, but most commentary also hates on it.
I’ll be real with you. There’s a reason JavaScript keeps being chosen despite the hate. It’s so much easier and the dev experience is much more polished for creating desktop apps.
The reason it’s hated on is that it is running a browser in the background, which people view as too bloated for a desktop app. Moreover, JS tends not to play well with system-wide themeing like GTK or QT.
But in the end, as a developer, you’ll be dealing with a lot of messiness going with anything else. If you’re up for a challenge, do try other things. But if you just want something that works and looks nice, do Js
JS or really anything you’d make a web app in (I use Rust with something like Dioxus/Yew/Leptos/Tauri), C#/.NET (I use F# because OO-style languages are ugly and a hot mess, especially C# and Java), Java/JVM (I use Scala whenever I can and Kotlin otherwise), C++ with GTK or Qt. There are a lot of options but obviously anything that’s not C++ or web is gonna give you a lackluster experience (though I have a thing against web apps and will go through a lot of hoops to have my application use a native interface)
For a desktop app I would go with none of those.
If cross platform is the goal, the more important question, and independent of the programming language, is which GUI framework you will use.
Your best bet, at least if you are looking for a stable GUI framework, the best candidate may be C++ and Qt. But that’s a hassle in its own right - both C++ and Qt.
TypeScript will have some solutions for you, with web rendering as a desktop app. Golang will have Qt bindings or other more experimental/not thoroughly established+popular GUI frameworks.
My personal favorite ecosystem is .NET. It has an official cross-platform UI project MAUI, but without an official Linux target. Community extensions probably exist. Personally, I dislike the way the UI is declared and bound though (XAML).
My current interest, which I have not explored or validate yet, is using .NET but then host a web or Blazor app in it with Webview2. .NET supports cross-boundary programming, crossing web+managed/native development, and crossing web(HTML+JS)+managed.
Most of the time GUI and the framework technology is a hassle. Your question is too broad and unspecific, so there’s not a good answer.
If it’s not a “serious” project that you depend on [for your livelihood], pick and start with whatever [looks good or interesting] and go from there. If it is a “serious project” do a bit more GUI framework exploration and assessment, and pick and commit to something. If it’s a big commitment or risk, do prototyping with your candidates for verification and assessment - beyond the most simple examples, and for your specific usage.
Personally, I dislike the way the UI is declared and bound though (XAML)
You can write the MAUI UI in C#. No need to use XAML anywhere.
You can count Ruby out immediately. Terrible language.
Also replace JavaScript with Typescript. It’s strictly superior.
I don’t think Go has any mature GUI libraries.
For desktop GUI your main options are:
- Qt, via C++. Probably the best option but if you don’t know C++ that’s a huge barrier.
- Qt, via Python. Reasonable but Python is quite a shit language. It’s very slow and the tooling/infrastructure is absolutely abysmal. Be prepared to bang your head against the wall trying to e.g. get relative imports to work.
- Dart/Flutter. This is quite nice but not super mature for desktop apps. Also the Dart ecosystem is very small so libraries you want may not be available.
- Electron/Typescript. This is quite a good option. Nobody here will recommend this because nerds have a slightly weird hatred of Electron because the minimum download size is like 80MB. But normally it doesn’t really matter. Especially for big apps.
For the web frontend you basically want Typescript. For the backend you can use literally any language.
I would recommend Electron for the GUI and Typescript for the web frontend and Electron GUI. It means you can use the same language everywhere and you won’t need to even implement the same program twice.
If you’re worried about the download size / RAM usage you can look into Tauri which uses your OS’s browser engine. I’ve never used it though.
Regarding tauri: One and a half years ago I looked into it as a potential alternative to using electron.
Back then I had to decide against it for my use case, because when the goal is that it’s a cross platform app, then one has to make sure that whatever “webview version” is used on all target OS, they all have to support the features one needs re one’s own app codebase.
Back then I needed some “offscreen canvas” feature that chromium supported (hence electron), but which webkit2gtk (used on Linux) didn’t at the time.
https://tauri.app/v1/references/webview-versions/
So it’s not always easy to give a clear recommendation on using tauri over electron. One really has to get somewhat clear on what kind of “webview requirements” the resp. app will have.
But I do hope this will (or maybe already is) less of an issue in upcoming years (things are moving fast after all).
Ever tried to follow a large Ruby codebase like Gitlab? Absolutely nightmare. Not only does it not have type annotations, so you can’t follow code by clicking, but you can’t even follow it by grepping because Rubyists seem to love generated identifiers. Even the syntax of the language makes grepping worse, e.g. the lack of brackets prevents you from grepping for function calls like foo(.
You’re talking about rails. That’s like saying Kotlin is a terrible language because your only exposure to it is with something that decided to use Glassfish Webfly Swarm and Camel.
type annotations
You can literally follow code perfectly fine in an IDE like RubyMine. It actually works much better than Python because Ruby is incredibly consistent in its language design, while Python is an absolute mess (same with JS. Try opening a large Python or JS project in PyCharm or WebStorm).
No clue what you’re talking about with grepping though. Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.
In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential. Saying something like “Java is terrible, have you ever used it for a CLI? It’s so slow it’s impossible to do anything!” is idiotic because of course it is. That’s not what it’s built for. Ruby is a scripting language. Use it for scripting. It kicks Python’s ass for many reasons, JS is terrible for scripting, and while you can use something like bash or rust, the situation is incredibly painful for both.
None of this has absolutely anything to do with the language design. You’re talking about language design and equating it to being terrible and then saying it’s because you don’t use any sort of tools to actually make it work.
