The most common end-user operating systems are Android and Windows, neither of those require a special GUI to create an app. You don't even need to buy specific hardware to write programs for those.
Try to create native Android apps without Android Studio, or Windows native apps without Visual Studio tooling, by native meaning using the platform GUIs, SDKs, APIs and blessed tier 1 programming languages.
Not trying to fit somethig that requires lots of yak shaving, and workarounds, to make it work without the vendors tooling.
Native APIs from the platform, not stuff that abstracts the platform.
How about using the vendor tooling? Here for example is the guide to running and building C# desktop Apps on MacOS: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/maui/first-app-tuto...
This is one of the blessed tier 1 languages, GUI made by the platform vendor, and using a collection of open-source cross platform SDKs from the platform vendor.
Debugging on Windows if your customers are on Windows is probably more convenient, but people aren't using XCode for convenience, it's literally the only option to build any app.
Also, what's with this moving of goal posts:
> by native meaning
To ship non-native Apps on iOS you still need XCode.
> the platform GUIs
You can't publish a CLI on iOS, and for non-platform GUIs you still need XCode.
On all other mainstream platforms you can write a posix-compliant C program, and cross-platform it from almost any OS to almost any other OS. Android makes is a bit difficult to run CLI apps, but otherwise iOS is the one big exception to this, right? Don't you agree that iOS is a little bit different in that regard to other platforms?
The only way to get around it is to pay someone else to run XCode for you. Or
No, but it is on Windows? But you don't need Visual Studio or even Windows to write a desktop GUI application, and you can then run "natively" on Windows. "Native" is what Microsoft call it.
No, I'm not going to. I didn't claim all Windows APIs can be debugged or easily used without Visual Studio. I didn't claim all of Android features can be debugged without Android Studio.
Pornel made this claim:
> Building and code signing without Xcode is nearly impossible. [...]
Not for specific APIs, for all APIs. Just building code in general, and getting it signed (for e.g. iOS) requires XCode. To which you said:
> A trait common to all platforms, with exception of UNIX ecosystem, and even then commercial UNIXes aren't as free choice as BSD/Linux clones.
Why are you trying to limit this to specific APIs? Yes, there are some tasks you can only do in VS. But not to write any program working on Windows. Same for Android.
Indeed, but there's AvaloniaUI for this luckily. You could say it isn't blessed but works everywhere. There are case studies where rewriting WPF applications in Avalonia was solving memory and performance issues.
