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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#111

Post by 52-6F-62 »

windsurfer wrote: post #35
eicossa wrote: post #23

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…

Well, Slack is currently taking almost 3 GB of memory on my machine. Not entirely sure if that's due to Electron or Slack, but I have never found an Electron app that didn't consume vast swathes of memory. https://imgur.com/GscRFD7.png

I tend to get "helpers" that pile up that seem to consume the most.

I developed an application with Electron (+ Vue + Node) for an internal tool used by non-technical staff at my work and I don't have nearly the consumption as some other applications, but there is a lot less occurring on the renderer process than it appears with other applications.

I've added VSCode (with a large project), my application's usage (censored because it's proprietary, but it's a document-based application) and the worst memory offenders on my system (16GB 2015 MBP):

https://imgur.com/a/9rs707J

I've heard of other similar strategies-- but the best one seems to be to offload as much of the work to the main process or talk to a binary wrapped up in the application and do as little lifting with the renderer (the Chromium portion) as possible. My results have been alright so far.

Re: Electron 7.0

#112

Post by inferiorhuman »

kick wrote: post #66
bryanlarsen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QT Quick also uses a markup language.

Not a good or reasonable one, though. This is no slight against Qt devs, and I think they're fixing it in Qt6, but it's just not good.

QML is basically javascript with some syntactic sugar. I loathe javascript as much as anyone but that's not dramatically different from Electron.

Re: Electron 7.0

#113

Post by adev_ »

bb88 wrote: post #60
scrollaway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insert any framework in place of SwiftUI. You're describing Qt, essentially. The approach has been tried, and succeeded to some degree. But the web is the only app where cross-platform is the default , and it's truly hard to avoid it. Even if the widgets all look different. Even if nothing looks native (people got used to it anyway). And to be clear I want the status quo to improve in this regard, especially in terms…

>But the web is the only app where cross-platform is the default No. Chrome is the only platform that is cross platform by default. But IE, eg, has definitely had behavior differences in the past. On the other hand, Qt is cross language, but not necessarily cross platform (it excludes iPhone and Android, say)

> Qt is cross language, but not necessarily cross platform (it excludes iPhone and Android, say)

Qt supports Android and iPhone.

Re: Electron 7.0

#114

Post by pritambaral »

rosybox wrote: post #83
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?"

The problem with Qt I have is how incredibly expensive it is. Sure it's free if you want to build something open source, but you know some of us have to also make money to pay for being alive and it's hard to bootstrap an application if you have to pay $5,508 up front, per developer, and then again on an annual basis.

You can use Qt with closed source software, under the LGPL license that you don't have to pay for. Only the binaries that have Qt code need to be open. Don't statically link Qt libs into your closed-source code and you're good.

Re: Electron 7.0

#115

Post by [deleted] »

bluesroo wrote: post #104
inferiorhuman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

[deleted]

Re: Electron 7.0

#116

Post by adev_ »

ethanpil wrote: post #58

A lot of the bloat complaints about Electron are addressed well in Sciter ( https://sciter.com/ ) although, Sciter has its own set of limitations. I have found Sciter a great option for many use cases. (I'm not affiliated with Sciter in any way).

Sciter and Ultralight are the way to go on paper. They address many of the issues of Electron and it does it in a very portable way. Instead of embedding the world in a giant toolkit, they give to you what you want as a library, easy to interface with native code.

However they are proprietary, and this is a no go for me and many. There is no way I bind my software stack to an arbitrary unstable compiler ABI and its platforms. Nor I will bet on a toolkit that can disappear tomorrow if its only maintainer disappears or get hit by a bus.

We need something like these projects, but OSS and still I would be happy to pay for that.

Re: Electron 7.0

#117

Post by TimTheTinker »

blux wrote: post #31
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,…

Is the comparison with Qt relevant? My understanding is that Electron is for JavaScript what Qt is for C++. Is there not a better fit for C++ development in the web UI ecosystem?

> Is the comparison with Qt relevant?

Absolutely, when considering cross-platform UI frameworks in general. In that sense, Qt competes not only with Electron, but also with toolkits like wxWidgets, GTK+, JavaFX, Flash, and some older ones like Java/Swing, Lazarus and Adobe/Macromedia Director.

Re: Electron 7.0

#118

Post by bitwize »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #108
bluesroo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box. Well as a user I've already dismissed your app out of hand. Congrats.

If you have hungry mouths to feed, and whether or not they get fed depends on whether your app makes enough to justify the time and expense it takes to develop it, tell me you would have made a different decision.

When development is your livelihood, you target the platforms that make money and only the platforms that make money. That pretty much means Windows and maybe Mac. Anything else is throwing money away.

Re: Electron 7.0

#119

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bluesroo wrote: post #104
inferiorhuman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

So really you only care about 2 operating systems, and you're willing to give up all the native integration opportunities on both of them for the minor convenience of only having to write one (bad, bloated, totally-out-of-place) GUI.

Developers in the 90s often supported 5 or more different platforms. How is it that modern development is so much worse?

Re: Electron 7.0

#120

Post by stephenson »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #108
bluesroo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box. Well as a user I've already dismissed your app out of hand. Congrats.

I think congrats are in order, he did not get distracted with a minor part of the market but is focused on delivering value to the bigger market. He can always add more clients later.
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