kordlessagain 3 days ago

What’s the point of a one-to-one GTK3 → GTK4 rewrite when the user experience doesn’t improve at all?

Why not modularize the backend and build a better UI with tech that’s actually relevant in 2025?

3
georgemcbay 3 days ago

I'm not the person you are asking but the point of this whole thing seems to be as a test for how possible it is for an LLM to 'vibe code' a port of this nature and not really because they care that much about a port existing.

The fact that they haven't done the port in the normal way suggests they basically agree with what you said here (not worth the ROI), but hey if you can get the latest AI code editor to spit out a perfectly working port in minutes, why not?

FWIW, my assessment of LLMs is the same as theirs. The hype is far greater than the practical usefulness, and I say this as someone who is using LLMs pretty regularly now.

They aren't useless, but the idea that they will be writing 90% of our code soon is just completely at odds with my day to day experience getting them to do actual specific tasks rather than telling them to "write Tetris for XYZ" and blog about how great they are because it produced something roughly what I asked for without much specificity.

aleph_minus_one 3 days ago

> Why not modularize the backend and build a better UI with tech that’s actually relevant in 2025?

Doing the second part is to my understanding actually the purpose of the stated task.

pdntspa 3 days ago

Why are you calling GTK4 irrelevant? Large swaths of Linux run on it and GTK3

written-beyond 2 days ago

Might be someone implying that electron is a superior (modern) solution. Which, if so, I whole heartedly disagree with.

aleph_minus_one 3 days ago

> Why are you calling GTK4 irrelevant?

Quite the opposite: Gtk4 is relevant, and porting Solvespace to this relevant toolkit is the central part of the stated task.

pdntspa 2 days ago

I guess I pinned my response to the wrong thread.

phkahler 2 days ago

>> What’s the point of a one-to-one GTK3 → GTK4 rewrite when the user experience doesn’t improve at all?

I'd like to use the same UI on all platforms so that we can do some things better (like localization in the text window and resizable text) and my preference for that is GTK. I tried doing it myself, got frustrated, and stopped because there are more important things to work on.