>> any serious developer
The "serious developers" I know already scoff at the idea of a human friendly language and user centric IDE.
Since this Plain C changed to C++ code base dates back to MetaCard on BSD Unix in the early 1990s, and has been ported to macOS classic, macOSX, iOS,Win16,Win32,Win64, Linux, Android (which is Linux underneath), etc.etc., and has run on Motorola, PowerPC, Intel, ARM, etc, etc. for close to three decades now, there's always going to be compatibility issues, particularly if everyone working on it is mostly only using just one of the platforms from it's cross-platform support list. So it sure would be good to have some platform diverse involvement.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm personally not all that interested in things like "real servers",
I AM a hobbyist coder. And I'm a fan of xTalks since the original scripting language, HyperTalk (in the late 1980s) and I want an xTalk to remain available to as many people as possible.
I've been making music/musician toys/tools for a target audience of mostly just me, that's part of why I'm here. If your ultimate goal would be to have commercial production quality anything for free then you should probably not waste your time on this and either stick with LC Ltd. or go with some other commercial entity or tools backed by the big players or that has an already large community... something like Flutter/DART (Google) or Visual Studio/C#/.NET/Mono (Microsoft) or even Python or something like that. I don't think any xTalk will ever be able to compete with those at this point, That's probably a cause that was lost way back when JavaScript became the dominant "scripting" language for HyperText interactivity in the mid-90s.
I've personally been clearing space on my laptop for installing some Debian distro (probably with Enlightenment and GNUStep). I'm not the Apple fanboy I once was and I may just drop macOS all together at some point (after I retire since my day job is in graphic arts and so I need to run Adobe apps as well as additional proprietary software).
I did read about this one on the list:
https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=36243
Seems to have something to do with Windows versions not being good at expanding it's buffers/memory allocation issue.
I did see there was script work arounds for that. I'm interested in this sort of thing because of MIDI message buffers.
Not sure about this, but GUI issues might be easier to fix than engine problems, certainly on mobile it's probably best to use widgets, either native or substitute custom built. Android engine is using Linux / Motif by default, which looks old and ugly to me, by default. I've made some pretty good looking / responsive Android apps with custom data grids and and such, have not hit this issue mentioned though:
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=22965
Launch command might be easily fixable by adding a check that the exe actually exists
https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=104&t=35765
Fonts!!! I'm a pre-press guy, don't get me started!...ugh!
The IDE has some system font names as string literals in it's scripts ...
I wrote my own LCB to use system font manager, because I wanted to retrieve more information about the fonts being used than the engine's minimal font functions could deliver.
I don't know, neither of the images look bad, just different from one version to the next, obviously something with pixel density changed between 8/9. I wouldn't worry about it since that's more of a backward compatibility thing. I wouldn't count on any app to being graphically consistent from one version to the next.
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23308
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21804
Date and time, localized on mobile...seems that could be fixed or could make an LCB library for that.
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11726
Mobile URL problem I think could be fixed, or substituted
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23308
I think this could be fixed in the LC CLI build, might just be adding a flag and some IF control structure... or could just be commenting out some font lib stuff to make a "no fonts" version
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23163
I think there's probably a LOT of bugs that could be fixed fairly easily and they just don't have the manpower/time to do it all and have to spend time on priority things like customer demand... I know I've just killed an hour replying to this thread, and now I have to get ready to pick up my son, drop him off, and go to my real job...so i get it! But I'm not running a business here so I can spend my time on whatever I want to.