Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.

It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.

On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).

On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.

And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.

But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).

I've heard of people using Godot for non-game applications and I'm tempted to try something similar in the (near?) future because supposedly Low Processor Usage Mode makes it kinda feasible/sensible if you develop with that in mind from the start.

And while web pages can masquerade as desktop and mobile apps why wouldn't games be allowed to do the same? Godot for example can do desktop multi-window while something like Flutter (which is amazing in its own right) can't do.

But yeah, someone needs to spend time and build out UI toolkits for Godot and sadly that's not really a long weekend undertaking.

Still! It's nice to dream from time to time and imagine a reality where we can either do some generic cookie cutter UI because it's meant to get things done without much ceremony or we can pull out all the stops and plop a 3D scene to walk around the file system and shot files to delete them. And yeah, I'm aware someone did a thing like that in VS Code with Three.js (I think?)[0] and for Flutter you can do something similar in a webview inside the app proper.

Yet somehow I would rather do those things inside Godot for reasons unknown to me.

[0] Found it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=brian-nj...

Your Godot scene doesn't work in Unreal Engine. I always felt that composition is unnecessarily hard in game engines infrastructure. I do web development as a hobby, and any .js file targeting the DOM works on any browser. I can't even run GDScript in Unity!

You're just comparing the wrong things. Yes, when you're locked into one environment, everything works together well. The moment you interact with outside systems, all hell breaks loose. If anything, what you're saying is just that platforms should have a much larger stdlib, or abstract platform differences properly (hint: this is only doable if you're a game engine and can afford to absolutely ignore _everything_ the OS does and just concern yourself with reinventing every wheel).

Not to say there's nothing good in the games side of things: a bunch of software could benefit from accepting that some systems like a big fat central message bus and singletons can be good when handled well.