March 9, 2026
Snake eyes, hot takes
So you want to write an "app" (2025)
He tried to build one tiny app across 7 platforms — the comments rolled a natural 20
TLDR: A coder built the same tiny dice app across seven platforms and roasted each with sarcastic awards. The comments erupted into a web‑vs‑native brawl, with critics calling the write‑up vague, old‑guard fans hyping WinForms and Pascal, and jokesters dubbing C the immortal cockroach — proof dev tools are still a battlefield.
A veteran coder built a simple dice‑roller across seven platforms — from old‑school C to Android and iOS — then handed out sarcastic awards like “Most uninspired” for Windows and “Most fun to waste time with” for Apple’s SwiftUI. But the real show was the comments, where the crowd went full boss fight. One camp mocked the vague “new developer experience” goal — “rambling notes,” said one skeptic — while another shouted, “Just make it a web app already!” as if Electron were a cheat code. Android’s “mask off” jab and POSIX’s “Most useless” tag sparked spicy side quests.
Then the nostalgia raid arrived. A Pascal die‑hard flexed Lazarus like it’s 1999, a factory tinkerer swore off pricey Visual Basic, and a .NET loyalist insisted the answer was “C# with WinForms” because Visual Studio still slaps. Meanwhile, calling C “Most resistant to obsolescence” turned into a meme: the “cockroach of computing” that never dies. Jokes flew about shipping the whole thing in Excel, rolling for initiative before every build, and localization being the true final boss. Bottom line: one tiny app revealed a big divide — web vs native, shiny new vs comfy old — and everyone’s convinced their toolkit rolls a crit while yours needs a saving throw.
Key Points
- •The author built a simple dice-roller app to evaluate modern native developer experience without using Electron.
- •GUI versions included platform-integration tasks: persistent settings and localization to at least one non-English language.
- •The app was ported to Standard C, C/POSIX CLI, Linux with GTK/GNOME, Linux with Qt/KDE, Windows with WinUI 3, macOS/iOS with SwiftUI, and Android with Jetpack Compose.
- •Each platform received a brief, sarcastic one-liner summarizing the author’s impressions of its developer experience.
- •The article details a Standard C implementation and notes C remains suitable for simple text-based apps despite its known safety issues.