One or more characteristic of a user interface (UI) associated with an application source code can be abstracted into a view-controller object that conforms to an environment independent format. The characteristics can be a layout characteristic and a control element characteristic. A placeholder functionality for presenting the user interface can be embedded within an executable created from the source code. The placeholder functionality can lack the characteristic. The executable can be a target native runtime environment specific executable including programming instructions conforming to a programming language of the native runtime environment. The view-controller object can be converted to a language specific user interface object conforming to the programming language. The placeholder functionality can render the user interface using the UI object during runtime of the executable.