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Electron considered harmful

drewdevault.com

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Re: Electron considered harmful

#151

Post by rootlocus »

bmpafa wrote: post #129
rootlocus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If writing software is about making users' lives easier, happier, or better, though, I think we ought to optimize for that and that alone. That's (imo) your flawed assumption. And no, just choosing electron won't make your users happier. > Love it or not, JS is a point of entry for a hell of a lot more ppl than C++ is C++ is not the only alternative. And considering the staggering amount of frameworks and tools one…

> just choosing electron won't make your users happier. Ah thanks, I lost some clarity in a post-write edit. My point wasn't that choosing electron would do that, it was that we should look more at end-user satisfaction and less at often pedantic technical analyses of solutions. Re: C++: You may be right, but we can't deny that popularity and cool factor has a significant effect on hard metrics--eg, more frameworks,…

> you should probably prefer the first definition ("go around, past the edge of") instead of the fourth definition, as you've done here.

That was the third definition. The first definition was "a woman's outer garment fastened around the waist and hanging down around the legs." /snark

> we should look more at end-user satisfaction and less at often pedantic technical analyses of solutions.

They aren't orthogonal. User satisfaction comes from a smooth experience. Regardless of how shiny something is, if it slows down the rest of the system (or is itself laggy) users will notice. I choose to run foobar instead of other music players because it's small and fast.

> are we further limiting a great web UX to those with the money to afford the latest laptops?

This is what infuriates me. People have been talking about how the "free lunch" is over [1] since 2009. About how CPUs have stopped getting faster, and how we should make the best out of the current hardware by learning to paralelize. Yet javascript is the most popular language and it's fundamentally single threaded. High quality software is not about having "a great web UX". VLC doesn't have it (great web UX). Blender doesn't have it. Intellij IDEA doesn't have it. And they're not only extremely complex and efficient softwares, they also have great UIs. Our computers are extremly powerful. The fact that someone would wonder if they're not enough to run pretty clipboard managers and fancy text editors is making me cringe.

[1] http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Re: Electron considered harmful

#152

Post by always_good »

SirCmpwn, you'll understand more about trade-offs when you finally have commercial success with one of your projects.

It's too easy to lambast Electron and "lazy developers" when you've never had business concerns trump technical ones because none of your work ever tried to run that gauntlet.

I had to chuckle to myself when I saw that your GitHub bio is:

    > I make unoriginal projects with better code than 
    > the thing they rip off. I'm available for hire.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#153

Post by santaclaus »

detaro wrote: post #143
jeremiep wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since this was an accidental post (now removed) in advance of the actual announcement and release, we've buried this story. That would explain why this is the first time I hear about it :)

Except it was announced 2 days later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967847 It's not really a port though, just another piece of software labelled "Visual Studio something-or-other".

Visual Studio Code isn't exactly a port either -- it is kind of interesting that Microsoft now has three entirely separate projects out there with the 'Visual Studio' branding.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#154

Post by roryisok »

jeremiep wrote: post #147
Mithaldu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dropbox itself takes 200Mb and its a simple python app. Google drive takes 300Mb. VSCode takes about 100Mb of ram with a project opened right now. Even my Emacs takes 250Mb and I literally live inside it. All of them have at least 2Gb of virtual memory being mapped to them. Yet I still have 9Gb of free ram. If you want to go against bloat, you might just as well uninstall every single software from your computer, inc…

Literally? I demand a photo of you inside emacs

Re: Electron considered harmful

#155

Post by ivan_gammel »

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…

>I'm fairly certain electron could easily be modified to be installed once and used as the launcher for its applications.

That's fine, we can return to this topic when it will become a mature launcher app. The thing is that today it's not in that state yet.

>Besides, almost nobody writes true native applications anymore

True native applications are not just the applications written using some native API and platform-specific low level language. Native app is the app that comfortably exists within the operating system environment, follows the UI guidelines and integrates with native UX and performance enhancing functions of the OS. For example, some universal Windows app written on C# is native on Windows.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#156

Post by mwcampbell »

catshirt wrote: post #59
tonyjstark wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> it does not look native and the devs don't care this is not valid. no need to limit our use case to devs, either. at worst, users don't care. at best, users prefer it. see Spotify, Discord, Skype, Sublime, Chrome, Steam... should i keep going? whenever i open an app that uses entirely native controls i just expect the author didn't want to invest any time into making their app look good.

Please explain why looking good necessarily means looking different from the native controls. Isn't consistency among apps on a given platform important?

Re: Electron considered harmful

#157

Post by roryisok »

I have a windows store js/html app which I plan to re-release on electron. It features a rich text editor and a few other features. I want to release on Linux and mac os. Should I go away and learn qt/gtk/wx? Restart the whole project in Java?

The idea that I might choose electron for ease/speed of development rather than use a leaner platform is being shit all over as a "business" decision. Not a "I don't have enough free time to learn two new languages and ui systems code three new apps" decision.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#158

Post by Roboprog »

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…

Hello again, qwerty'. Thanks for stepping up on the JS issue :-)

There are many good languages out there, "when used as directed". Alas, out here in the flyover country of Sacramento, there is really only demand for 3 kinds of jobs: Java, C#.NET (falling off), and some Javascript, ignoring the long tail of one-of-a-kind shops. Given those choices, I'll take the Javascript. Java 8 lambdas are clumsy to use to assemble much in the way of higher order functions.

I mean, cuz, who doesn't want to put this as a parameter into a function/method header:

(..., BiFunction,Map,Map>, ...)

E.g. - for the sake of argument, say I needed a callback to merge two associative arrays. Oh, you needed a third input argument? Write your own interface type, so you can use it to declare the callback parameter.

No, I'll take the JS, thank you very much.

(as we discussed a month or two ago, Java is a [somewhat] new Business Oriented Language, and it's pretty Common)

Re: Electron considered harmful

#159

Post by Roboprog »

Roboprog wrote: post #158
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…

Hello again, qwerty'. Thanks for stepping up on the JS issue :-) There are many good languages out there, "when used as directed". Alas, out here in the flyover country of Sacramento, there is really only demand for 3 kinds of jobs: Java, C#.NET (falling off), and some Javascript, ignoring the long tail of one-of-a-kind shops. Given those choices, I'll take the Javascript. Java 8 lambdas are clumsy to use to assemble…

... and it's been ages since I did any TK (tcl/tk) :-)

Re: Electron considered harmful

#160

Post by m_fayer »

nilliams wrote: post #117
ChuckMcM wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Electron is a really good fit: for example, shipping a single-page webapp as a desktop app, a need that surfaces often in today's world, despite his derision of this concept." From a systems perspective that is emminently rant worthy, it indicates the system has completely failed the developer who cannot easily express what they can in a single page web app as a real application in the system.

Yep, all the native toolkits failed, that's worthy of ranting about, but that is not what OP was doing.

The only native toolkit I've ever tried that I thought could compete with web is wpf. It was slow and cludgy but way ahead of its time, and the web is only now starting to approach its power.
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