What are the limitations (or negatives) of using Godot 4 to create desktop apps?

Question

Now that Godot 4 is getting stable and that we have Vulkan support, I was thinking that while I want to learn Godot 4 for gamedev, It will also be interested to create some desktop/mobile apps with it. I know it can do it and I also searched some videos on YT that make some examples. My question would be, compared to something like QT or GTK, are there any limitations to Godot? Or things that will make creating desktop apps not worth it as much as with the other two (or any other "simple" graphics library)?

EDIT:
Btw, is anyone aware if Godot can fully export to web at the moment? I have heard that WebGL can do that but I'm no sure.

Comments

Of course. So much so that the even the full editor itself can run through the web.

And talking about limits. There are some file system ones you'll face with the web export.

Answer 1

Wow you're comparing very different tool sets here and it all depends on what exactly your app does

For desktop, GTK and QT are by far the better options as they allow full window management and control from the ground up and can design exactly what you want, the way you want it.

Godot simply ignores all that micromanagement and lets you focus on the functionality of your app which is great for mobile users, not having to meddle with canvases and fragments or activities

If your goal is simply to make your app multi-platform again it really depends on what your app does as all 3 options can provide equally satisfying results

Comments

Thank you! I want to learn Godot anyways tbh so I also wanted to hear it's potential into creating apps. Have a great day!

Answer 2

if you need richtext-editing, then go qt. it would be great if godot had a rich text editor. if you need alot of custom styled widgets, then go godot, you will spend lots of hours customizing qt-widgets, crossplattform building is better with godot, it is difficult with pyside, but i dont know about native qt with c++.

Comments

Thank you! That's really interesting! I don't think I'll need rich text, simple one will do fine. Btw, I forgot (but I updated the question), do you know if Godot can be used to properly export apps on the web with fully support? I heard that they do that with WebGL but I would like to hear someone with experience.

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From a personal preference and quality of product standpoint I wouldn't skip rich text, currently Godot has some pretty horrible text rendering but it has some pretty beautiful 2D graphics rendering so it's really down to you as to whether you go that way or not.

The downside of not using richtext is that you may run into cases where users want to spice up their text documents with italics or bold so I would probably go with something that can do it.

Looking through the documentation for rich text on godot I think it's actually doable, you'd have to write a serious amount of custom code to get full functionality but there are "richTextLabels" already implemented.

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it is possible to do a richtext-editor in godot by a overlay of a textedit over a richtextlabel (there is a program made with godot 3 called World Maker, that does this in its wikieditor, just search for it), but if you want to process the formatted text (which is bbcode'd) e.g. to html or other formats you have to write a converter on your own.

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Thanks for all the great info!