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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#971

Post by krisdol »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #656
krisdol wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line is getting really blurry with both Atom and VSCode. Haven't used VSCode, but the only feature I recall missing in Atom right now is refactoring; and to be fair, last time I used a real IDE (XCode), I couldn't refactor there either.

For me, refactoring is something that is nice to have, certainly, but not what defines an IDE. The debugging and development facilities are what matter most.

A lot of that is available in "text editors" like Atom (and I assume VSCode). Of course, it depends on if someone wrote a plugin for your language of choice.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#972

Post by michaelmrose »

baddox wrote: post #907
michaelmrose wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are less likely to be spinning up vms but may have far less ram to start with and the more apps they use that are wasteful of power and ram the more likely this becomes an issue for them. It is truly strange to hear being resource constrained being described as a special case in computing.

Why is that strange for personal computer usage? How common do you think it is for users to experience a performance problem caused by low memory? I'm genuinely surprised that we could apparently have such opposing intuitions. My intuition is that it is exceedingly rare.

Your intuition is badly formed because it ignores how crappy real peoples computers are. The world is full of really bad computers that people don't upgrade because their computer is a low priority item for them and they have lots of other more important things to put their money towards like food shelter, and medicine.

Further their machines are full of software that runs all the time for no reason including but not limited to multiple redundant antivirus that are trying in vain to scan everything in real time in a vain attempt to prevent the next malware infection from taking hold.

Various services like file system indexing and virus scans run at inconvenient times and render things slower than before.

Laptops are super prevalent because their portability is more important than power. Its not at all unusual to keep using the same machine for 5-8 years as long as it still works.

Real people have bad computers with bad specs and in a massive number of cases the browser is already using a significant portion of the entire computers resources.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#973

Post by Volt »

cr0sh wrote: post #582
pikzen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But now? People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are excited about the Desktop again - Electron is so good it's single-handedly revitalizing the platform that two of the largest tech companies in the world are behind, yet couldn't do. >xpaulbettsx: JavaScript Hacker at Slack Ah, yes, we are all grateful for Slack's 850MB of memory used when…

One of these days, you'll look at 850 MB of RAM like I used to see 4K of RAM: Amazed at how small it was, and how much we have today. My first computer saved data to a cassette tape; today, terabyte hard drives are nearly give-away prizes in cereal boxes (yeah, I know they don't do that anymore, either). We have machines in our pockets which are arguably (in some ways) more powerful than the machines only government-…

And yet, we live in the present. The rate of software bloat is outpacing improvements in commodity hardware.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#974

Post by erikpukinskis »

wvenable wrote: post #781
erikpukinskis wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly backwards. JS succeeded because it's not a monoculture. Within JavaScript there are multiple frameworks, even multiple languages (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, ES6, etc). Win32, Java, MacOS, et al lost because there were such strong standards for doing things the One True Way that competing standards couldn't flourish and the APIs stagnated. In JavaScript, a new framework comes out every year and goes…

JavaScript frameworks are ultimately solving problems that the Web/DOM/JavaScript infrastructure created in the first place. The amount of technology required to create a single page application is staggering yet on the desktop that's just "an application". The technology has been around for 20 years and we're just getting to point in JavaScript where we were 20 years ago.

Yes, of course JavaScript has made tradeoffs to get where it is. Those seem like problems in isolation, but look what we got in exchange:

- apps from untrusted developers can be run safely

- app installs are measured in milliseconds and don't require switching windows

- app updates are invisible to the user

- beginners can modify apps without leaving the app itself (MySpace profiles, etc)

- references deep inside one app can be embedded in another

- apps run on nearly every device from one codebase

Native app programming can do many things well, but failing on these counts is a deal breaker for many purposes. You act like JavaScript's weaknesses are somehow due to ignorance on our part, but they are tradeoffs made deliberately.

And for the most part, the things JavaScript is bad at (high performance graphics, professional ergonomics, etc) are things that are improving. I don't see native apps getting millisecond installs any time soon. It's a classic disruptive technology.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#975

Post by [deleted] »

sametmax wrote: post #736
apostacy wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those problems have been replicated with HTML5. Yes, HTML5 can do some cool things. But I also find myself missing flash sometimes. HTML5 was not a replacement. And, based on the direction things are going, I think it's only a matter of time until you can't even select text properly or scroll in a predictable way.

Few people rewrite scrollbar with HTML5 based tech. I have yet to see a virus propagate because of a W3C web API. For the memory/battery though, you are more and more right every day.

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#976

Post by emj »

username223 wrote: post #784
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…

Those who forget desktop Java will be doomed to repeat it. For those of you who aren't old enough to have been around, Sun initially pushed Java as a "write once, run everywhere" GUI language. It quickly became clear that Java applications were ugly and terrible everywhere, even in the primitive days of X11R5, when programs used a mixture of Xt, Motif, Qt, GTK, and raw X11 protocol (xv was awesome). Having a Java pro…

I would like to offer http://openstreetmap.org as a counter example, where the best editing app is made in Java and the most used one is Javascript. There have been QT4 editors but they have never gained traction, I never found the problem to be performance between native and Java.

I think Javas problem was it's Unix engineering roots, with too little focus on UI, and perhaps a little too much of the "we don't care about performance"-mindshare. The latter being the only problem I see with some electron apps.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#977

Post by ori_b »

pluma wrote: post #914
ori_b wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If VSCode isn't slow because of electron, what's the reason it's slow?

VSCode isn't slow. Atom is slow. Since both are written with electron the difference must obviously be the actual implementation, not the platform itself. Keep in mind VSCode was written by Microsoft who have decades of experience writing IDEs and text editors, whereas Atom was written by GitHub who are mostly working on the GitHub product.

> VSCode isn't slow. Atom is slow.

Could have fooled me.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#978

Post by kofejnik »

cableshaft wrote: post #360
sametmax wrote: post #159

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. 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.

take a look at https://github.com/dddomodossola/remi, which transpiles python into html (kind of)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#979

Post by guzgarcia »

Electron as is, consumes relatively more resources than QT and it's obvious because uses Chromium under the scene. But this is not the only reason for a slow electron based program. Code is the most important thing in any application and it's the primary cause of bad performance. A well writen and optimized application will have a good performance, no matters on which platform is based (good ones, obviously). "Electron is slow" is like "Java is slow" right now. Do you want a probe of a well writen electron app? Check VS Code; it's fast, it have a good performance and consumes a lot less resources than Atom, for example.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#980

Post by niutech »

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…

> Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along

What? Have you heard of Adobe AIR, AppJS, Node-Webkit (now NW.js) and Mozilla Prism/WebRunner?

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