I have 10+ years of high-performance C++ development for distributed systems/databases/operating systems but have zero experience with web/app development. I wanted to try my hand at app development to prototype a few ideas. I looked at the landscape and I am struggling with the following questions:<p>1. Native apps vs a PWA (web app)- what is the recommendation these days?
2. If I want to build native apps, is there a stack that will make it easy for cross-platform development? React Native seems to be a popular suggestion online but it is only for business logic not UI?<p>3. Are there any useful resources/stacks suited for someone familiar with C++ development?
Disclaimer: I am an application developer, and one of the maintainers of the Drogon C++ web framework.<p>C++ & apps don’t fit well together technologically these days.<p>Android? Go Kotlin.<p>iPhone? Go Swift.<p>Cross platform? Meh, kind of dislike middleware as they always lag behind the vendor. This was the case three decades ago as it is today.<p>Usually you are far better off by defining a REST API as your border between platforms, then just use whatever easy (de)serialization techniques the language will give you.<p>Personally I have a cross-platform C++ stack built on top of Drogon that I can use on multiple platforms, then it’s usually a native UI layer (Kotlin + Compose on Android, Swift + SwiftUI on Apple platforms) on top of the cross-platform layer. This way business layer code can be shared across every platform while only the UI needs to be adapted to its host OS.<p>Drogon website: <a href="https://drogon.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://drogon.org</a>
I’ve had good developer experiences with Flutter and C++ for cross platform dev. I’m not a C++ developer, but working with Flutter’s FFI and getting native code running made me want to be a C++ programmer because it opened up my eyes to the possibilities of high performance solutions I could build on mobile.