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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#141

Post by nindalf »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #96
rolleiflex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

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.

I'm perfectly happy supporting 99.99% of desktop users out there using Linux/Windows/MacOS. Users of BSD, Haiku, Redox and TempleOS are sadly not numerous enough to support.

It's the same reason any app developer nowadays only supports iOS and Android and not say, KaiOS (honestly, hands up if you've even heard of KaiOS). Don't rag on software teams for making trade-offs based on the resources they have.

Re: Electron 7.0

#142

Post by inferiorhuman »

boernard wrote: post #128
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

that 'minor' convenience is a quite huge one given that he stated that the other apps wouldn't exist if not for electron.

that 'minor' convenience is a quite huge one given that he stated that the other apps wouldn't exist if not for electron.

That's an awfully bold, if unbelievable, claim given that cross-platform toolkits have existed for a long time.

Re: Electron 7.0

#143

Post by badsectoracula »

fetbaffe wrote: post #21
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.

Kinda. Lazarus is great and all (though even Delphi 2 felt more coherent, which is a side effect of Lazarus not really being a single project nor the result of a single vision), but the only LCL backend where everything works as expected is the Win32 one with the Gtk2 one being just a bit behind. Other backends are of a much more "alpha" quality, especially the Cocoa backend (for many years the Carbon backend was what was developed since it was easier to interface from C - AFAIK the Cocoa backend really got focus when Free Pascal got its "Objective Pascal" compiler mode that extends their OBJFPC dialect with Objective-C compatible features and the ability to directly use Objective-C objects) and the overall Mac support is lacking in manpower compared to the others (some people prefer to use the Qt backend - which isn't as good as the Win32/Gtk2 - just so they get a bit better Mac support, but that adds a lot of extra unnecessary bloat since in addition to LCL's own overhead, you also get the Qt4Pas overhead and Qt's own overhead, not to mention you do not get "real" native widgets).

Re: Electron 7.0

#144

Post by crispinb »

mangosherbet wrote: post #29

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.

Quelle horreur - clearly web tech is the future of UI, and electron is a reasonable choice until a better solution comes along, but the ecosystem is a foul mess for developers. `npm [anything]` fills your hard drive with an astronomical tangle of hideous code. And there's webpack. You will end up wanting to strangle yourself. Avoid unless you really need it.

Re: Electron 7.0

#145

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

CDSlice wrote: post #133
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're bothering to include Linux in your list of Desktop platforms at all you may as well include the BSDs. Besides, Java works fine on BSDs. Why is it that when modern developers reinvent the wheel they so often manage to do it worse than the last time?

> If you're bothering to include Linux in your list of Desktop platforms at all you may as well include the BSDs. I guess, but the amount of people I know that use BSDs are even fewer than the amount that use Linux. Given that Linux is a hard enough sell to support for most apps I doubt that BSD support would be offered even if the framework supports it. > Besides, Java works fine on BSDs. Why is it that when modern…

You can quite easily bundle the Java runtime with your application. Many Java applications do this. As a bonus, it will still be smaller than the equivalent Electron application.

Re: Electron 7.0

#146

Post by kick »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #112
kick wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't claim Electron was good, either.

Re: Electron 7.0

#147

Post by inferiorhuman »

nindalf wrote: post #141
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.

I'm perfectly happy supporting 99.99% of desktop users out there using Linux/Windows/MacOS. Users of BSD, Haiku, Redox and TempleOS are sadly not numerous enough to support. It's the same reason any app developer nowadays only supports iOS and Android and not say, KaiOS (honestly, hands up if you've even heard of KaiOS). Don't rag on software teams for making trade-offs based on the resources they have.

Don't rag on software teams for making trade-offs based on the resources they have.

It's not just that app devs aren't making non Linux/x86 apps, the problems are that those devs now cannot make non Linux apps. Period. In spite of this lack of portability they're now crowing about how portable and awesome their "cross-platform" app is. All of this to provide the consistently mediocre Electron experience.

Re: Electron 7.0

#148

Post by kodablah »

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.

With their multi-process approach, you'd have separate processes even when sharing the runtime to the point that sharing the DLLs likely has minimal benefit. It's the equivalent of running firing up Chrome twice w/ two different user profile dirs...shared libs, but no obvious perf advantage over two separate Chrome installs.

Re: Electron 7.0

#149

Post by httpsterio »

dewey wrote: post #103
rolleiflex wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. Unfortunately that’s a designer bottleneck rather than anything else. Think of it this way, if somebody ends up with a mess of an Electron app, he or she probably wouldn’t have fared any better in usability with a native app even if the UI would look superficially ‘in-spec’. Edit: Also as an example, Aether comes with plenty of shortcuts, or even has proper tabbing and tab highlighting for low-visi…

I wouldn't necessarily say it's just the way it looks, it's also how things work that you get for "free" when you use the native UI toolkit. Examples would be shortcuts, tabbing through form fields, how a file explorer works and other small things. The file explorer in VSCode for example doesn't really behave like a native one, you have to manually refresh, you can't easily drag and drop and everything just feels a b…

Just last week I added shortcuts to our MacOS and Windows Electron app in about 15 minutes. I didn't read any documentation and I'm not even a developer, just a designer. I can barely make a proper if loop in js and I can't tell the difference between a method and a function either.

Electron is sooo simple. I mean, we've run into some pretty interesting issues like with hardware acceleration and difference in color and font rendering between platforms, but if a guy like me can code, sign and ship a fully functional application, anyone can.

Also, I can really recommend Vue and Quasar for anyone looking at building electron and mobile apps. Really fun!

Re: Electron 7.0

#150

Post by sroussey »

CDSlice wrote: post #131
inferiorhuman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs? Yes. Or Linux on non-x86 platforms.

Electron not supporting ARM or other non-x86 platforms is a big problem that I was not aware of. I wonder if that will change with Microsoft starting to make ARM laptops and Apple being rumored to switch to ARM sometime in the future.

The announcement this whole discussion links to talks about the new ARM support, so I am confused as to what you are talking about.
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