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Electron considered harmful

drewdevault.com

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Re: Electron considered harmful

#131

Post by rootlocus »

evilnode wrote: post #98

I've been fighting with this for a while now. I think the only good reason to use something like Electron is if you need to get a cross-platform POC up and running quickly. I am currently trying to make a GUI to compose and render Terraform assets in a similar manner to AWS CloudFormation's visual designer, and I've spent an eternity trying to devise the best way to do this (this is mainly driven out of boredom more…

> I'm a GUI novice. Is there any cross-platform software that generates a true native UI on target platforms?

wxWidgets does

Re: Electron considered harmful

#132

Post by jeremiep »

nilliams wrote: post #121
santaclaus wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the average application going native will easily triple your development time and costs for absolutely no noticeable performance difference. Sublime text still smokes Atom and VSCode in the performance arena.

And yet they're still popular, so it can't be that significant of an issue.

> Significant enough that it comes up anytime there is a discussion on HN.

Because people don't know any better, shun anything that isn't their pet technology and generally sit on the wrong end of the Dunning-kruger effect.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#133

Post by santaclaus »

jeremiep wrote: post #114
mherrmann wrote: post #101

I recently had to decide on a GUI technology for a file manager I'm developing [1]. Electron is sexy, but unfortunately takes way too long to start for my purposes. I ended up with PyQt: Pros: + Fast startup speed + I can use Python (and its vast ecosystem) + Qt has good ready-made components for eg. displaying a list of files (which is exactly what I need) Cons: - Compiling Qt (which I have to do for various reasons…

A file manager would not be a good use-case for Electron. Especially if you don't intend to run it in the browser (which really would make no sense.) For the very reason you outlined - startup times. The average use-cases of file managers are being opened and closed very often. Electron is rather aimed at long-running applications you don't usually restart, like Atom and VSCode. Microsoft could've ported VS to other…

> Microsoft could've ported VS to other platforms

Aren't they doing exactly this? [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12948043

Re: Electron considered harmful

#134

Post by [deleted] »

nailer wrote: post #42

> 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]. ye…

[deleted]

Re: Electron considered harmful

#135

Post by mherrmann »

jeremiep wrote: post #114
mherrmann wrote: post #101

I recently had to decide on a GUI technology for a file manager I'm developing [1]. Electron is sexy, but unfortunately takes way too long to start for my purposes. I ended up with PyQt: Pros: + Fast startup speed + I can use Python (and its vast ecosystem) + Qt has good ready-made components for eg. displaying a list of files (which is exactly what I need) Cons: - Compiling Qt (which I have to do for various reasons…

A file manager would not be a good use-case for Electron. Especially if you don't intend to run it in the browser (which really would make no sense.) For the very reason you outlined - startup times. The average use-cases of file managers are being opened and closed very often. Electron is rather aimed at long-running applications you don't usually restart, like Atom and VSCode. Microsoft could've ported VS to other…

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I open/close my editors just as often as my file manager.

The main benefit of Electron is the community. Everybody knows HTML/CSS/JavaScript, so can write extensions / customisations. If I were Microsoft, that's how I would have justified Electron.

Still, I personally much prefer Sublime Text :-D

Re: Electron considered harmful

#136

Post by nilliams »

santaclaus wrote: post #127
nilliams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they're still popular, so it can't be that significant of an issue.

Significant enough that it comes up anytime there is a discussion on HN.

> Significant enough that it comes up anytime there is a discussion on HN.

That is not a useful indicator. There's a reason that 'editor-wars' is a running joke.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#137

Post by Mithaldu »

jeremiep wrote: post #99
ivan_gammel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Electron allows the world's most popular layout system (HTML+CSS) to be used with one of the world's most popular programming languages Just wanted to name the most obvious alternative: embedded browser component like QtWebKit, which allows to code most of the application logic on the language of your choice. Embedded browsers are the way people have been doing it since circa 2000 (by then, Windows was dominating pl…

I'm fairly certain electron could easily be modified to be installed once and used as the launcher for its applications. I'm also fairly certain we'll see this in the future. Therefore all claims that electron bloats 200Mb are just temporary. Its still a relatively young technology with huge potential (which also means huge potential for misuse!) I spent 5+ years writing native GUI apps in half a dozen frameworks, I…

Even if the app is smaller on drive, it still takes ~200mb in ram for even the smallest apps.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#138

Post by RandomOpinion »

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.

>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.

Oooh, we could give this core a snazzy name like "Flash" or "Silverlight" or something too.

Once again, history repeats itself.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#139

Post by jeremiep »

mherrmann wrote: post #135
jeremiep wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A file manager would not be a good use-case for Electron. Especially if you don't intend to run it in the browser (which really would make no sense.) For the very reason you outlined - startup times. The average use-cases of file managers are being opened and closed very often. Electron is rather aimed at long-running applications you don't usually restart, like Atom and VSCode. Microsoft could've ported VS to other…

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I open/close my editors just as often as my file manager. The main benefit of Electron is the community. Everybody knows HTML/CSS/JavaScript, so can write extensions / customisations. If I were Microsoft, that's how I would have justified Electron. Still, I personally much prefer Sublime Text :-D

My Spacemacs session often grows weeks old :)

Emacs also has a client/server architecture so I can spawn the emacs daemon and then connect to it from anywhere.

We have a few people in VSCode at work, a few in Sublime and yet more in Atom. They're all very happy with their setup :)

Re: Electron considered harmful

#140

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #125
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #81

sigh First off, JS is a perfectly usable language. In some respects, it's even great: of the "big three" scripting languages (Python/Ruby/JS), it's the only one that got Lambdas right, and also got closures right (unlike, say, Python). It has sometimes-quirky syntax, and some odd semantics, but they don't bite as often as you'd think. Second off, I would say that this article is right about the bulk of Electron: It's…

Do you mean https://github.com/KnightOS/scas ? It's pretty much done. Documentation is lacking in the repo but there's a detailed man page.

Oh, good. The repo's current documentation indicates that it's deeply unstable, which is why I drew that conclusion.
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