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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#21

Post by fetbaffe »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'm bullish on Electron. I think it's just a couple of technical advancements away from being the ultimate desktop toolkit. For context, I love and have worked a ton with Qt, and I much prefer Qt UIs as a user. But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!). If it weren't for Electron, I wouldn't even have a bunch of the apps I use today. Hell, I wouldn't have a good IDE,…

Free Pascal & Lazarus has already solved this problem, but no one cares because Pascal is outdated & therefore we need to reinvent the wheel over & over but doing it worse for every iteration.

Re: Electron 7.0

#22

Post by mikepurvis »

Hendrikto wrote: post #6
headcanon wrote: post #2

Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"

> "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" That one is true though. Different Electron apps could at least share the runtime.

Is that really possible? I feel like it would only work with considerable engineering effort, and even then, probably only if the bundled Chrome instances were all exactly the same version.

Re: Electron 7.0

#23

Post by eicossa »

Wait ... let me see if I can anticipate the top comment

"Electron consumes so many resources ... Why so resource hungry ... My workstation already runs Chrome, can't have electron apps bogging it down ... Slack runs on Electron ... VSCode is the only good Electron app ... Why are we doing this ... Dennis Ritchie would be turning in his grave"

This topic could honestly trigger the "parse regex with html" kind of reply.

Re: Electron 7.0

#24

Post by Hendrikto »

judge2020 wrote: post #18
Hendrikto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" That one is true though. Different Electron apps could at least share the runtime.

I imagine the different electron versions and different Chrome versions would make this hard without breaking things. Maybe a config option for "allow chromium between versions x and y" would solve this.

Shouldn‘t Chrome be backwards compatible? I would hope so at least.

Re: Electron 7.0

#25

Post by brylie »

YesIndeedSir wrote: post #11
brylie wrote: post #7

Is there ongoing work to reduce the memory footprint of Electron apps? I'm genuinely curious.

Yes - WebAssembly. It would hopefully kill the whole thing as an end game.

I have a, probably misguided, fear that We Assembly will inadvertently usher in an era of read only web, basically breaking the "view source" idea almost unique to the Web.

Re: Electron 7.0

#26

Post by jszymborski »

I love HTML/JS as a desktop UI toolkit, but much prefer the approach Qt WebView approach where javascript callbacks hook directly to code as opposed to running an entire webserver/HTTP stack. If not for the performance, for the ability to skip the sort of security problems the Signal desktop app had run into at some point.

Re: Electron 7.0

#27

Post by judge2020 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #9
Razengan wrote: post #3

Since this is inevitably going to generate some discussion over native apps vs. Electron (ah there's already a fellow comment about it), I'd like to point out an example that is important to me of why Electron is an inferior experience for users: In the GitHub Desktop client, which is an Electron app, I can't spell check my commit messages, something that every text field in every native macOS app gets for free.

Web text fields should also support that functionality, so it may be a question of GitHub breaking/disabling it in some way.

Kind of odd, is doesn't look like there's a built-in spell checker available in Chromium since you need a spell check provider[0]. I imagine Google injects it into their Chrome when deploying.

0: https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/api/we...

Re: Electron 7.0

#28

Post by _bxg1 »

judge2020 wrote: post #27
_bxg1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web text fields should also support that functionality, so it may be a question of GitHub breaking/disabling it in some way.

Kind of odd, is doesn't look like there's a built-in spell checker available in Chromium since you need a spell check provider[0]. I imagine Google injects it into their Chrome when deploying. 0: https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/api/we...

That is interesting; I assumed it hooked into the OS-level functionality but it doesn't appear to. Hmm.

Re: Electron 7.0

#29

Post by mangosherbet »

Is there a good introduction to starting development with Electron as someone who is a C++ developer? I find web development quite difficult to grok in general; lots of frameworks and technologies.

Re: Electron 7.0

#30

Post by paulryanrogers »

Hendrikto wrote: post #6
headcanon wrote: post #2

Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"

> "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" That one is true though. Different Electron apps could at least share the runtime.

Except they cannot, Chromium (or is it Blink?) changes too frequently to reliably code for one version and expect backward compatibility of future releases. Electron versions could be shared libraries... except again BC breaking releases proliferate.
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