Furthermore, it is the employer's responsibility to provide tools for employees. I'm not going to get into a tug-of-war with my employer over this. I simply work with the tools I am provided.

For self-employed individuals and companies, this should be regulated by the market. If competitiveness correlates with the use of the right tools, the problem should resolve itself. If this correlation does not exist, then it is questionable whether these tools have any added value at all.

If this market mechanism does not work properly because Big Tech systematically undermines it, then it might be appropriate to consider whether this could (or could not) represent a more far-reaching social problem and what solutions there might be. If you go down that route (which I would advocate), it very quickly becomes very political. In any case, it should be clear that this problem cannot be solved by simply shouting at developers: “Pay for your tools!”

What complicates matters further is that our work requires more than just tools in the narrow sense. The entire stack, down to the compiler, web server, and ultimately the operating system and operating system kernel, is based on countless hours of unpaid human labor. On the one hand, it would render us incapable of acting if we were to economically quantify this entire value chain like Diocletian and then insist on slapping an appropriate price tag on it. On the other hand, there is no justification for why we should only do this with the tip of the iceberg that we call tools.

Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.

I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.

This is cool, but there is no LICENSE file putting this in DONT USE territory.

This has a license: https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone but it vendors the other repo according to the readme? I am super confused about how this would work.

This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.

Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

Dear lord, what?

What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.

What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.

What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.

A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.

Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?

[1] https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape

  - using HTML
  - using JavaScript
  - using JS+React
  - using Dart
  - using Kotlin
  - using Swift

This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

I've built with Flutter and React Native a few times over the years, but I will give Skip a go in my next project, I've heard a lot actually.

  Skip requires a macOS 15+ development machine with Xcode 16.4 or later installed.

  With no additional managed runtime, Skip apps are as efficient as they can possibly be on both platforms.

  At least 32GB of memory is recommended for development with Skip.

I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.

So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.

Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.

Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.

But everything eventually goes to waste.

because after experiencing flutter/RN, crossplatform framework/tools really hard to get right and this is with fb and google resources btw.

sometimes you must really deep in shit and realize that you make mistake to choose these technology