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Electron considered harmful

drewdevault.com

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Re: Electron considered harmful

#41

Post by falcolas »

adamnemecek wrote: post #27

I dislike JS just as much as the next guy but the only real contender on the list is Qt. Which you need to license for commercial development. Furthermore, even though I like to think that I'm ok in C++, I would really think twice before using it on my next project these days. The JS performance issues should go away for the most part when wasm is standard. Also a lot of people write some compile to JS language, not…

If you're doing commercial development, why is a license (and the attendant support) a big deal? Its cost in relation to that of your developers is neglegable.

Or is the cost of the license really that prohibitive for a well supported and performant piece of software?

[EDIT]: I found the pricing after a bit of creative googling: Startups is about $1,000 a year, non-startups are about $3,500 a year. Even without the discount, that's roughly equivalent to a month of one developer's time. IMO, not a terrible deal, for something you can freely license and use for cross platform development.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#42

Post by nailer »

> For the price of 200 extra MiB of disk space and an entire Chromium process in RAM and on your CPU, you get a less capable GUI that saves you from having to type the -ss and -t flags yourself.

Cool. I remember when Handbrake first came out, and 'make video go on iPod' went from some long winder research into ffmpeg flags to clicking a button that says 'output for iPod' [1]. This sounds similarly timesaving.

[1]. yes, iPod. Showing my age.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#43

Post by jeremiep »

sergiotapia wrote: post #19

I look at Electron apps the same way I used to look at Adobe Air apps. Any League of Legends player knows how bad the launcher is - 80% the fault of Adobe Air. Sure it was easier to build, but your users suffer for it. Electron apps are pretty terrible performance wise, and you can immediately tell it's an Electron app. - Atom - Slack - GitKraken All of these apps have 'tells'.

Electron apps have exactly the same performance as web apps, which is what its aimed at. Badly performing code can be written in any language; you'd be surprised at how much mediocre C++ code is running on your desktop. You're also running insane amounts of mediocre C# applications.

Comparing Electron to AIR makes no sense, they're radically different runtimes with radically different ecosystems. AIR stands alone while Electron reuses the web stack already used by millions of developers.

I find it rather elitist to dismiss Electron apps as "easier" to build or having users suffer. Thats completely false and grossly overlooks the context in which these apps were built. This is the kind of comment you'd expect from a beginner without much experience wanting everything to be in his favourite language.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#44

Post by jasonthevillain »

striking wrote: post #4

See, I totally agree with this essay. But what are the alternatives? Getting started with Qt/GTK isn't nearly as easy, for example. Maybe someone should write an intro to native GUI programming for JS devs.

Someone should!

I ran into this when teaching myself Swift last year. Learning a new language is easy. Learning the ecosystem, architecture, and some initial best practices is a sisyphean task.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#45

Post by oldsj »

sergiotapia wrote: post #19

I look at Electron apps the same way I used to look at Adobe Air apps. Any League of Legends player knows how bad the launcher is - 80% the fault of Adobe Air. Sure it was easier to build, but your users suffer for it. Electron apps are pretty terrible performance wise, and you can immediately tell it's an Electron app. - Atom - Slack - GitKraken All of these apps have 'tells'.

Yea but look at VSCode, definitely an exception to this. The feel of code vs atom is night and day to me.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#46

Post by tonyjstark »

niftich wrote: post #3

This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the 'case study' applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside. But then the essay turns into a rant. It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. The fact is, for many types of applications,…

I think the author really has some valid points and he warns you about the rant part.

Valid points are:

  * Electron is often too much for the purpose
  * it does not look native and the devs don't care
  * often there are better tools
His points about JS being not a good programming language, meh, the language wars are probably never over #SmalltalkIsStillTheBest

Re: Electron considered harmful

#47

Post by nmca »

vvanders wrote: post #8

As some of who's had to support Qt, wxWidgets and other crazy x-platform UIs I find electron refreshing. Heck, I've got Rust talking to node.js in it. Elm for the front-end and Rust for the processing, it's a surprisingly pleasant development experience.

Hey, is this open source? Sounds very cool. If not, can you point me towards any open source apps that are using a similar approach?

Re: Electron considered harmful

#48

Post by FrancoDiaz »

Ianvdl wrote: post #30
niftich wrote: post #3

This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the 'case study' applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside. But then the essay turns into a rant. It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. The fact is, for many types of applications,…

> It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. Using the date as an argument is also poor form. JS is a terrible programming language (I'm not denying that it is a programming language though) regardless of how popular it is (although I think I might be going against the grain here on HN, many people her…

JS is a terrible programming language

I can never see the point of comments like these. Not one person who reads that will have his mind changed.

HTML/CSS can be nice to have in such a situation, although a refusal to learn other GUI frameworks probably makes for a poor (native) developer.

No it doesn't. Either the developer benefits or doesn't benefit from "refusing". There's only so much time in the day. I'll refuse to to learn Qt or gtk+, unless there is some overwhelming benefit for me to learn it.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#49

Post by witty_username »

K0nserv wrote: post #16

I think the points raised are solid, but at this point it seems like Electron is the best worst solution for cross platform UI. Having worked with Qt I never wanna do that again. There's also a much more significant portion of developers who can work on Electron based apps. Part of picking the best tool for the job involves considering maintainability and ease of development after all.

What are your problems with Qt?

I was using PyQt, and I found it nice (Qt's integration is good).

Re: Electron considered harmful

#50

Post by nmca »

Longhanks wrote: post #15
cdnsteve wrote: post #10

If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.

What if there was a centralized way of accessing HTML + CSS + JS applications? Instead of installing apps, you could just... "download" the necessary files to execute them? Perhaps even on demand from centralized.. "servers"?

Aha, he missed the joke...
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