I would prefer progressive web applications, which are stored in a cache and run in the available "browser" of the system, might it be Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge.
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#422Here'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…
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of the JS that's been written? If your answer is "Keep writing more JS," then you are on another planet. The answer is, "We have fucked ourselves as an ecosystem by permitting a monoculture to flourish, especially one which prides itself on worship of bad languages, bloated runtimes, convoluted abstractions, and general fuckery." Nobody in the last ~20 years has…
> like a pig farmer trying to sell pigs' feet
Actually - pig's feet are actually a pretty good eatin' portion of the pig. If you've ever had them, you might agree.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java. The world is asking for more and more software, and the resources to provide it are not following so people are taking shortcuts. Want something better ? Someone has to pay for it.
Yeah, but Python still doesn't seem to have a great cross-platform desktop GUI, as far as I can find. I'd prefer to code entirely in Python if I could, but I haven't liked a single GUI library I've tried for Python. Although to be fair I haven't really tried PyQT out still, but I don't like the idea of having to buy a commercial license for it.
PyQT is alright. Kivy as well.
Or anything in any other language.
But none of them are close enough to the benefit of being able to use the tone of experience from the Web UI into the desktop.
Eventually all GUI app toolkit ends up with a custom MVC framework, a client/server architecture, some kind of db for persistence, their own implementation of asynchronous event and communication models and a declarative layer to create the UI without code. For the most advanced this layer separate structure and layout.
Well guess what, this is what the Web has natively being doing for ever.
Since the web is now the most popular platform, with millions of libs and tutorials on it, people just reused that. It just makes sense.
The problem is not the concept. The problem is we should have driven this effort with a standard to sanely close the gap between the desktop and the web so that you don't have to spawn a freaking browser-engine-os for every one of your app.
But no, the web is the only platform with a standard. And it flourished while all the big players created closes gardens with proprietary shitty API. And this is the result.
Have you not seen Jurassic Park for god sake ? Life finds a way.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's moot if you're an established company with deep pockets moving slowly. If you're starting from scratch with limited funds, it is definitely not a moot point. Would Slack have been as wildly successful if they had to implement native apps on all 3 platforms + iOS + Android + etc? I'd have a hard time believing so.
You don't have to rebuild your app for all platforms. Desktop widget toolkits (Qt, GTK+, wxWidgets, ...) have bindings out to most languages. If you can run Python, you can run a desktop app on all platforms from a single codebase. Also, all major platforms have C and C++ runtimes; if you write portable C or C++, your codebase should run on any of the big three. It's ridiculous to pretend that you have to write 3 dis…
This is a tangent, but CMake is incredible for building cross-platform C++. I had a project a year or two ago that was developed as a .so for Linux, using CMake simply because I like it.
When I went to go build a Windows .dll, I rolled up my sleeves and expected to have a bad day. `cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64"` just went ahead and made a Visual Studio project from my source tree, and that project built and worked first try. I was using all C++14 stuff like std::lock, std::thread, etc, and there wasn't a single #ifdef required in the entire project. Amazing!
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mmmmm, steak.
I'm french so my english is sometime funny. I didn't mean a piece of meat from a weed smoking cow obviously.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#426Here'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…
There have been so many desktop apps released since 2007-2012 that I really don't know where to start:
- Everything GNOME does
- Everything MS does
- Everything KDE does
- All the apps in Mac OS
- Every browser
- Emulators
- Office suites
- Messaging apps
- Adobe's Creative Suite
- Blender
- All the content creation apps for video games
- Video games
- Editors
- IDEs
- Audio production suites
Web developers are excited about the desktop again, because to them the desktop is some kind of new frontier that Electron has opened up to them. I get that, but please be aware that just because something is new to you doesn't mean it's actually new.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 think, only a special kind of "developers" is afraid of learning languages. A language is, after all, means to use the frameworks. If you are an experienced developer, moving from a language to a language is a matter of hours to days, depending on paradigm changes. Learning frameworks takes much longer, obviously, but with the wealth of information available out there these days (Stack Overflow, message boards, blo…
Spot on, I serioulsly don't understand people that are Java developers/front-end developers/technology X devs if you're not talking about you're currently working on, and instead treat that as their profession.
Anyone would think it to be ridiculous if a carpenter told you he only works with saws because he is a saw carpenter and that for other kinds of work you should see the plane or sander carpenter. To me saying you're an [insert tech here] developer sounds the same...
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…
> Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power. Are they though? The two applications that use the most energy on my Mac - by far - are Steam and Skype. Steam still has trouble with HiDPI and freezes when performing various UI interactions. The number of problems with Skype are uncountable.…
Most of the Electron apps use multiple processes so you'll want to add up all their instances.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power. Are they though? The two applications that use the most energy on my Mac - by far - are Steam and Skype. Steam still has trouble with HiDPI and freezes when performing various UI interactions. The number of problems with Skype are uncountable.…
VS Code has way fewer features than Visual Studio, especially for C#/.NET development. VS Code is a minimalistic IDE, very useful, especially for javascript development where tooling is quite minimal anyways. But let's not think that VS Code outclasses visual studio.
> As far as interfaces go
You missed this qualifier in the parent comment.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#430Is there a Servo + WASM based alternative to Electron yet? Would it be more effective?