After decades of development the GUI space feels more chaotic than ever. There are several dimensions that can become critical bottleneck in advanced use cases (performance, platform independence, ease of development, library/tool availability and maturity etc) and - as this post highlights quite clearly - it is non-trivial to chart a path.
Some of the difficulty is definitely intrinsic to the problem space. Nobody said that arbitrary complex interfaces have a license to run at lightning speeds with minimal coding on arbitrary and/or minimal hardware.
But I do have the feeling that in part the difficulty is because the different approaches (both historical and current) have been effectively islands, self-contained with no standardization or separation of concerns. E.g. I would at least hope that we would by now have an accepted universal way to describe GUI's (declarative). I think this might be one reason for the popularity of web based approaches: while html/css was made for documents not GUI's, it is at least something everybody agrees on.
Some of the difficulty is definitely intrinsic to the problem space. Nobody said that arbitrary complex interfaces have a license to run at lightning speeds with minimal coding on arbitrary and/or minimal hardware.
But I do have the feeling that in part the difficulty is because the different approaches (both historical and current) have been effectively islands, self-contained with no standardization or separation of concerns. E.g. I would at least hope that we would by now have an accepted universal way to describe GUI's (declarative). I think this might be one reason for the popularity of web based approaches: while html/css was made for documents not GUI's, it is at least something everybody agrees on.