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> use Qt, which limits you to either C++ or this weird langauge/ecosystem nobody knows called Qt Quick Hmm, PyQt would remove the need to use c++ if that is an issue.
Isn't PyQt GPL though?
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
> Nobody cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it Wut? So the whole Mac App Store, MS Office Suite, Adobe's apps, many other stuff were just a dream? Until Electron desktop was dead? You're bending facts here, and I hope that's because you don't know much about the stuff you're talking about. Desktop is big, just that other things have grown bigger. That doesn't…
I don't see any meaningful suggestions in this article, just complaints.
You don't like how resource intensive electron apps are? Well, don't use them. If its really a big deal, people not using the apps will inform the people making the apps that they're bad.
That's not happening, so clearly it's not a big deal for most people.
Still... things could always be better in a perfect world.
Are you building desktop applications? What are you using for it then, and whats your cross platform perf story like? How long do cross platform releases take you? What are you paying for your tools and tooling?
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We use Java because Python proved to be too slow.
Yeah and some use C because Java is too slow. The point is, there is nothing new here, the history of computing is repeating itself. It's just now we have better toys, a bigger market and the stakes are higher.
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The other thing I find ionic about this whole article is that it's perfectly easy to only use Slack within Chrome as a normal web app. And the UI is almost exactly the same because it's nearly all the same code. So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly.
>So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly. That's even more horrible, i've tried it. Chrome uses his own notifications on macOS instead of integrating with systems notification manager and always when one of these ugly, poor animated guys pops up, i can search through my 100 open browser tabs to find the damn chat. Millions of flamewars were fought about what's the best wi…
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> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro…
I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's. The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous plac…
Won't that encourage more companies to cut corners? How can producers of quality products compete when other companies can release prototypes that their paying customers finish for them?
Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters. Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request. Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are yea…
I mean, programming languages and developer tools could be easy AND with high performance.
Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters. Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request. Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are yea…
We actually have written something similar for our product Elevate Web Builder (commercial, closed-source, written in Delphi), and have considered moving it to Free Pascal in order to allow developers to use it in portable, native desktop applications. The IDE for Elevate Web Builder has to provide a browser-like design-time environment for the WYSIWYG designers, so we created one. It effectively uses a DOM element tree structure like the browser, but doesn't use HTML or CSS. Instead, it surfaces all declarative styling as element properties (with real types, not everything as a string), provides its own layout management that is more application-oriented instead of document-oriented, and has a great batch update functionality that allows you to suspend updates/repaints until you're done making all necessary changes to the element properties of one or more elements.
The reason why it's such a compelling idea for us is because Free Pascal is a blank slate with all of the support code for multi-platform development, and we already have all of the code written for Windows. The reason why we're hesitant is because it's all in Object Pascal, so I'm not really sure if it's a compelling draw for JS developers that want to create desktop applications.
If we ever do something with it, though, we will certainly post it here as a "Show HN".
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
> If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet If developers weren't so scared of Swift and C#, this wouldn't be a problem. > (writing Desktop apps) is massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. I find the opposite to be almost universally true. Writing a lightweight nati…
I agree though that Electron is a problem. React native will probably be the best way forward. Microsoft has recently taken over RN-Windows and ReactXP, a RN-web clone. RN runs natively, doesn't need a browser, while being able to tap into the JS eco system.