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My first stop was Node.js, something I was only sort of vaguely familiar with before. It's a JavaScript runtime environment that has a package manager with every kind of library you could possibly need, including a dozen different frameworks to create a UI, like React.js. While it's most often used to write web apps that run in a browser, it can compile to exe. Personally, after setting up and creating a few test apps with Node.js and React and playing around with the package manager npm, I found the whole experience to be exhausting and a little bit overwhelming. This is coming from someone who has no problem jumping into a new programming/language environment with a manual and a pot of coffee.
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I looked at a few other things but not well enough to review them, until I stumbled on Dart. Dart is a newer language that's very easy on the eyes, reads like a cleaner version of C, and has incredible development tools. I never actually "learned" Dart, I just jumped in and was writing code in 5 minutes. It's also the language used by the Flutter framework, which is a much nicer UI experience than the Node.js alternatives like React and Express; and Flutter just added support to target native Windows apps!
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Appwrite
Appwrite - The Open Source Firebase alternative introduces iOS support. Appwrite is an open source backend server that helps you build native iOS applications much faster with realtime APIs for authentication, databases, files storage, cloud functions and much more!
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I looked at a few other things but not well enough to review them, until I stumbled on Dart. Dart is a newer language that's very easy on the eyes, reads like a cleaner version of C, and has incredible development tools. I never actually "learned" Dart, I just jumped in and was writing code in 5 minutes. It's also the language used by the Flutter framework, which is a much nicer UI experience than the Node.js alternatives like React and Express; and Flutter just added support to target native Windows apps!
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I highly recommend Visual Studio Code (an open-source all-platform editor, not to be confused with Visual Studio) with the Dart and Flutter extensions - you can just jump in and start writing Dart apps for the command line, then take a look at Flutter to see how the UI side looks. Dart code compiles to reasonably small executable file on every platform, with two limitations off the top of my head: I don't think you can compile for a different platform than the one you're using (there are CI/CD tools that can do this automatically, like GitHub), and I have no idea how Flutter fits into that process yet because desktop app support is relatively new.
