Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#811

Post by syrrim »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

Who gives a shit. The point of writing natives apps isn't just to check it off your bucket list - natives apps can have advantages over web apps if done right. Those advantages include better performance, integration with native UI components, integration with native APIs, and integration with the file system. The only one a "native" electron app can accomplish that a web app can't is the last one. If your app doesn't require integration with the file system beyond a file selector then an electron app offers no benefit AFAIK. Companies do it purely so they can tell everyone they have a native app without having to invest the work required to get a real native app. My suggestion for the author is to find a browser they like, and then run all electron apps as web apps within the browser whenever possible.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#812

Post by [deleted] »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#813

Post by yoodenvranx »

Psilidae wrote: post #416
josephg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm consistently blown away that stuff like this gets past testing. Personally I think every software engineer should have a CPU meter of some for running on their machine while developing. Its an essential element of seeing what you're doing. How can you write decent software without having even that much visibility over what your computer is up to while your code runs? These huge CPU sinks making it through to rele…

I think this thinking is exactly how it gets past testing. You could force every engineer to have a CPU meter, but that alone won't help; they'll ignore it, assume it was a coworker's change that made the usage higher, or just assume their CPU is high because of their 30 Chrome tabs currently open while developing. A better solution would be to have CI monitor CPU usage so that increases/decreases could be monitored…

You could force every engineer to have a CPU meter,

No, you should force every developer to have a shitty Core 2 Duo CPU from 10 years ago. A lot of devs are working on new shiny i7s and that will hide a lot of performance problems because it's a top end CPU. Do your testing on a cheap box and if it is still smooth then you can ship your product.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#814

Post by voltagex_ »

user5994461 wrote: post #689
sha90 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, 5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It's also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won't b…

I meant 1080p when I said full HD. It takes a surprising amount of power to decode. The cheap CPU from netbooks have been struggling for a decade, especially in battery power saving mode. Lately, they get hardware acceleration just for that. Special CPU instructions and drivers just to achieve that decently.

For Youtube in particular, they're sending VP9+opus where the browser supports it, without considering hardware acceleration. The rather anaemic Atom chips might have H264 decoding on-chip, but only Kabylake has VP9.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#815

Post by shalmanese »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

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…

Facebook still has not made any desktop apps available, leading me to rely on a hodgepodge of 3rd party, electron-esque shells to provide a desktop experience.

This is despite their mobile apps being the most minutes used apps of any company. Even then, they tried to go with a electron-esque approach and only backed off when the performance and UX tradeoffs became unacceptable.

If one of the most profitable companies in the world can't see the business case for supporting a first party desktop ecosystem, it's very hard to believe many other companies have the justification.

This isn't an engineering problem, it's a business problem.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#816

Post by greenhatman »

Veen wrote: post #116
matthewmacleod wrote: post #97

Earlier 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…

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

>There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them

That is definitely not the whole story. Costs are shared between developers and users. If it's more expensive to develop an app, you can bet it's going to cost users more too.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#818

Post by gpderetta »

Arizhel wrote: post #676
coldtea wrote: post #445

Earlier 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. Yeah, but until Electron and they like, we seldom shipped desktop apps in anything than C, C++, Delphi etc even after all those decades. Which are all as close to the metal as can be. And in fact C/C++ can be as fast, or even faster than hand-rolled assembly most of the time (with few exception), s…

>And in fact C/C++ can be as fast, or even faster than hand-rolled assembly most of the time (with few exception) This is generally true, but to be fair the reason is because we design CPUs differently these days. Modern CPUs use instruction sets that are specifically designed to work well with compilers, and aren't meant to be programmed in hand-coded assembly except for a few critical bits deep within OS code. Olde…

> the reason is because we design CPUs differently these days. Modern CPUs use instruction sets that are specifically designed to work well with compilers

You got the causality wrong. Assembly programmer-friendly CPUs died because​ CPUs which weren't as friendly were faster and cheaper; those same CPUs were instead more amenable as compiler targets.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#820

Post by ris »

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

"Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value."

I'd rather have 95% of the code on my machines written by those from the former camp.

And if you think about it, the 5% of it is the stuff that comes & goes. Slack? Big now, but will anyone remember it in 5 years after the next big thing?

So which camp is generating the true "value"?

Post reply on HN