Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

>> why are people writing this stuff in C. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in Assembly.

>did anyone ever actually say this?

Yes, in the 8bit era.

So many divisive opinions here, but in case anyone reads this far down, here's my 2 cents:

- Yes, desktop apps existed before Electron. But the top comment is right. How many desktop apps. NOT utilities but full featured apps (like Spotify and Atom) that you loved either got swallowed up by other companies (Mailbox) or discontinued due to "lack of use" (read: lack of profitability). I'm sure if you dig deep you can remember quite a few...

I'm a game developer with a background in C++. But I'm developing my company's prototype in electron. This is because I can do it myself without needing to tap a bunch of people to help and find funding. I can bootstrap. Electron allows this and it's incredible. I couldn't make a cross platform game engine in a year on three platforms using native. Maybe you can and you're just a better human/coder than me (but seriously, email me in a year with your progress!) but Electron is allowing it.

What does this allow? This allows me to release a product (yay) and maintain a product easily (double yay!) and when you guys don't throw money at me.... I can KEEP maintaining it because of my low overhead. With native code and a staff of 20 I would be forced to shut down the product.

THAT BEING SAID

If the game does well? I'm not only using Electron, I'm using React (yes, it's a game. Yes I know, I've had this discussion. I'm crazy) so the next step is to port it to react native on the desktop and remove the Electron dependency. Totally doable since Microsoft is supporting it on the Univ. Windows Platform (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows) but macOS? Someone's working on it but it's of course not apple (https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos). Ubuntu is on top of shit though (https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/blog/2016/08/05/introducing-...)

I can't speak for Spotify or Slack or any of the people mentioned (yes I know Spotify isn't using electron) but for a small company of 1 and a half people Electron is allowing innovation and project completion in a way that nothing else is for me. It's a great door to open to allow future optimizations. And hey, maybe Electron will slim down too... give it time. Remember how bad Windows development was? No? I do. But .NET has come a long way, maybe electron will too. If not, we can always port!

But - can I get a copy of Notepad++ on my Linux box? No?

Now - I know there are a ton of other options for Linux, but the thing is, I can't jump from system to system and have the same app with the same experience - even if the app was developed as a native app for all of the platforms, because each has a slightly different native GUI implementation and usage which doesn't translate fully between each.

So now I have to learn and use potentially three or more different programs/apps/whatever to do the same task. Or, I have to remember the quirks for each native implementation.

...and let's be honest: Not many companies out there are going to develop a native version of the same app for all the platforms, because most platforms have a lower number of users than others (in many cases, much lower - depending on the genre of the app in question - like games).

It's an economic tradeoff: We either get a balkanized system where for certain kinds or types of apps we need a particular machine for the native implementation, or we have the case of these larger cross-platform apps that anyone can use on any system, in the same manner everywhere.

Here's another thing - most of these complaints seem to have to do with laptop users. I don't really worry about these issues on a desktop, because there I can have a ton of memory and way more CPU than what I can get in most laptops, and I don't have to worry about battery power.

But for those who are stuck with laptops - maybe they need to bother manufacturers to increase the amount of RAM and CPU available, to handle these larger apps.

It's also funny that I hear people complain how these apps are too big, and use too many resources for editing text or whatnot; you make the case that vim and notebook++ use only a few meg of memory, and no CPU.

I tend to wonder how well they'd fair on my old TRS-80 at home - you know, I had a full-screen text editor on it that didn't use much CPU (sub-1 MHz) nor memory (less than 64K) - so why can't we return to that?

Honestly - I don't want to; but we can take this argument down the rabbit hole, because the argument that today's stuff is bloated compared to another case, can easily be made about today's stuff vs older stuff. Most of that bloat of your "smaller" example comes from abstraction; the same as the "new bloat" - not many years ago a program taking of 10 MB of RAM would have been insane. Today, it's normal and expected.

I daresay that in the very near future, programs taking up several hundred meg to a gig or so will also seem normal, because by then we'll have even better CPUs (with maybe hundreds or thousands of cores) and way more RAM (terabytes).

Some might argue that this is the case today, in the form of cloud computing and SaaS - browser-base stuff, in other words.

Thanks for the tip. I'll have to look into SWT. I only chose Swing because it was included by default, but I would prefer to have the actual native look on each OS.