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Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

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Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#51

Post by nathan_f77 »

zzalpha wrote: post #28
seanwilson wrote: post #6

I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt. I read people saying things like Spotify and Atom are "unusable" and slow because they're written in JavaScript when they have plenty of happy users. A few 100MB of RAM or disk space extra is a nonexistent issue as well to typical users. I know some developers get very offended at a program using a bit more RAM or CPU than it should be but develo…

Speaking as someone with an Ultrabook that had to run Chrome, Outlook, Skype, and various office apps and so forth, this attitude infuriates me. Slack uses 400-500MB of memory. That's 15% of my RAM. For a chat application. Every Electron app is in this range. None share a runtime or memory footprint. Believe it or not, not everyone has 16GB of RAM. This level of inefficiency is utterly inexcusable.

Now that you mention it, this is pretty ridiculous: http://imgur.com/a/HyFay

Code Helper is from VSCode. VSCode, Evernote and Slack are all completely idle right now. I don't think they should be using any memory at all. Especially not over 700 MB. I don't even understand how they could possibly be using that much memory.

Is it just memory leaks?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#53

Post by StavrosK »

johnfn wrote: post #27

Electron hasn't stopped Spotify from making the most widely used music client and VSCode from making the third most popular IDE.

I can't say I've ever used VSCode, but I like Spotify despite its UI, not because of it.

That having been said, I don't use Spotify a lot, as the UI is really cumbersome and puts me off the entire thing.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#54

Post by nathan_f77 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #12

Who cares if Electron is unpopular (is it?)? I use Electron apps daily: Atom, Spotify, and Wmail, and I'm perfectly productive with them. Atom is definitely slower than Sublime Text, but I'm not sure it's Electron's fault (I read that it isn't). As for Spotify and Wmail, you can't even tell it's Electron, and certainly no average user cares or would ever know. I would do what makes sense for your app and makes it eas…

You should give VSCode a try. I recently switched from Sublime to VSCode, and I'm very happy with it. Startup is a little slow, but the editor is blazing fast.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#55

Post by lj3 »

irishcoffee wrote: post #9

Obligatory: Qt. I've been tasked as a Qt dev at my day job for the past ~2.5 years writing cross-platform applications. It works, the documentation is pretty fantastic, and you'll find no shortage of help online to get over the admittedly decent learning curve if this is your first swing at "c++" programming. Edit: As mentioned below, PyQt is also pretty fantastic. My most recent venture into the PyQt world at work w…

> As mentioned below, PyQt is also pretty fantastic.

Isn't Python just as slow as Electron?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#57

Post by pabloski »

gkya wrote: post #19
butz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PyQT is a nice alternative if you don't know/want to program in C++ .

AFAIK Qt also has support for writing apps in JS (isn't that what Qml is?).

Yes and no. You need a C++ skeleton to integrate the Qml files. Also Qml/JS is slow and doesn't support all the features of Qt/C++. Practically you use Qml for the GUI, but C++ for the logic.

Or you can create components in C++ callable from Qml, but this requires some extra code ( and work ).

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#58

Post by sktrdie »

Why not just have a daemon process that runs a site on HTTP or WebSocket so you can use the app in your browser?

I've seen apps that run with a double-click, stay open, and open my browser tab on 127.0.0.1:43110, with the entire app right there. It takes very little to develop, and it's lightweight because it's already using a runtime we all use most of the time (a web browser).

For the development side, this is pretty much the same experience as developing for Electron, but without the RAM/battery drainage.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#59

Post by pabloski »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #33
seanwilson wrote: post #6

I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt. I read people saying things like Spotify and Atom are "unusable" and slow because they're written in JavaScript when they have plenty of happy users. A few 100MB of RAM or disk space extra is a nonexistent issue as well to typical users. I know some developers get very offended at a program using a bit more RAM or CPU than it should be but develo…

I tried switching to Atom a few times, but I couldn't handle the slowness. It's just too laggy. On the other hand, I recently switched to VS Code, and I couldn't be happier. The startup is still a little slower than Sublime, but the editor is blazing fast. I really think this is just a problem with the architecture of Atom. Spotify is also a bit slow and clunky, but it's not too bad. There's no reason why they couldn…

Maybe Microsoft is making heavy usage of Node native modules. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this is the reason why VS Code is much faster than Atom.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#60

Post by lj3 »

dopamean wrote: post #46
gkya wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd audaciously guess that it's the songs you play in it that makes the spotify app popular, not the pack of ones and zeroes that the developers thereof like better.

Speaking just for myself here... I use Spotify every day and I can guarantee that I would switch if the software experience was bad. I honestly can't think of a time the app crashed. It can switch between my mobile devices and the desktop seamlessly almost every time. The overall design is intuitive enough _and_ it happens to come in a color scheme that I love. I used to find my music elsewhere and could do it again…

Switch to what? Everything else costs quite a bit of money (buying songs individually). Or you could pirate your music. Either way, it takes a shit ton of time to build up a halfway decent music library from scratch. Especially when the convenience of 'just search on spotify and add the entire artist to a playlist' is right there for free.

I've had the spotify app crash my computer a few times. And then there was that fiasco a while back about it writing many, many gigs of data to SSDs and shortening their lifespan. Convenience will always trump software quality, but as soon as there is a competitor with better working software at a decent price, I'm jumping ship.

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