What technologies are used to develop SourceTree?

[Mohit Thakral]

Sourcetree seems to be a cross platform tool. It runs on Mac and windows. My question is what technologies are used to develop source tree. Is it .Net Framework and MONO. It is not HTML5/JS for sure. Neither is seems to be qt.

Thanks a ton for answer in advance guys..

[KieranA · Accepted solution]

Hi Mohit,

It's not cross platform, the product is developed for a specific platform in each instance, so for Windows we used C# and for Mac we used Objective-C.

Cheers

[Mohit Thakral]

Thanks for respone Kieran, Can you please explain me the basic reason of not using any cross platfrom technology like javafx , .net framework+mono , qt , embeded nodejs server with html5 js css app

[stevestreeting]

I'll answer this since I made the call originally. I have a long history in cross-platform development, and what it taught me was that when you use a cross-platform toolset you inherently choose development speed over the ability to really exploit the target platforms fully. Whether it's speed, access to platform-specific refinements and service integrations, there is always a trade-off.

When you're writing back-end systems this doesn't matter that much, but desktop applications live or die by how well they integrate with the target platform, and that last 10% that you can't squeeze out of a cross-platform solution may well be the difference between a user choosing your product or dropping it for a different one. They don't care about development time, or the explanations about cross-platform tool not supporting that little esoteric platform hook they wanted, they only judge on the final product. Saving development time with a cross-platform solution is only a good option either when it's not visible to the user, or if you're willing to sacrifice a % of the user experience for dev convenience. With SourceTree I chose to match the platform 100% even if that meant more work for me, because I knew the end experience would be better - this is something that's especially important on the Mac.

[Mohit Thakral]

Thanks a ton Steve, This clarifies the decesion :)

[Ou Ping Koh]

Can't agree more, while a cross platform tookit is great for server side work, like java, mono, php, it really sucks at implementing a true native app experience.

[James Mark Chan]

I fired up source tree and it looks really nice on windows. However i've been doing most of my development on Ubuntu lately. Any interest in having a port for Ubuntu anytime soon or is that just not on the road map?

[Vladislav Yaroslavlev]

Have you plans to rewrite Windows variant of SourceTree on some native language, like C++? It will be more faster and responsive. Or to be more cross-platform and easy develop under Windows and Ubuntu, for example.

[MikeL]

I don't understand why you've chosen .Net, the cancer of the Windows platform.

[James Mark Chan]

This should probably be converted into a comment. Probably to get a more oo api like java is my guess. Wish it was available for Ubuntu!