241–250 of 289 posts
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,…
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I think this peaked some time around 2015. Back then, I remember many developers getting up in arms about following Apple's guidelines to a T, or insisting that Android apps look like a hyperactive stack of colorful paper cutouts under a direct light. Since then, I think many of us have gotten tired of looking at overdesigned sameness that by now we all know will age quickly. Programmers no longer see the sense in ch…
You are right but at the same time I am willing to bet you 5 years later someone else will make the opposite argument and be upvoted the same. It's a pendulum.
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I really hope this is the sort of thing products like VSCode will start turning to WASM for. Performance is their Achilles heel for the time being even though they’ve done a relatively good job considering.
A couple of things here. WASM isn't necessarily more performant than vanilla JS. For the web, it'll open the door to the JS engine as a compile target, and that's great.... but it's still not super fast. Secondly, in the case of an application, WASM is of little use since (with node and almost any programming language) you have an FFI available. One could simply shell out computationally heavy things to C++ or whatev…
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,…
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,…
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…
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There was an iOS email client a few years back that used some LGPL components. They complied by providing the object files so you could, in theory, re-link (and re-sign) using your own updated LGPL library. Ahh, here we go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4302517 https://web.archive.org/web/20140325063249/http://sprw.me/lg...
Let me preface by emphasizing that IANAL, but I believe the issue isn't with the software vendor and is instead with the distribution platform (i.e Apple). The LGPLv3 mandates that users be allowed to modify the parts that are licensed by this license. The TOS of the Apple App Store explicitly disallows its users from modifying software they get from it, thereby running afoul of the LGPL. So this issue, as I understa…
* FSF's opinion: https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
* General conscious: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possibl...
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 p…
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> (even with QT you still need to adjust for conventions, spacing etc...) That is what I'm talking about: SwiftUI automatically uses the recommended conventions for spacing, padding, etc. which are different for macOS vs. iOS etc., and it also takes user environment settings into account, like font sizes and other accessibility options.
It can do this only because Apple exercises such tight control over all platforms. When everything is developed under the same roof, it is significantly easier to make it, "Just work." On the other hand, making three, independently-developed platforms look the same is nearly impossible. On a windows or linux box, you cannot guarantee things like screen resolution, ppi, dimensions, specs, compatibility, and the innume…
The whole situation is bizarre and comical if you look at it from a distance:
Everybody ALREADY puts tremendous effort in making sure things look and work the same everywhere: Browsers!
Not just Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, but the thousands of third-party maintainers (like yes Electron) in this newly-created circle of Hel that is the JavaScript ecosystem.
And now we're trying to turn the browsers into operating systems!!
Everyone keeps trying to reinvent a wheel that doesn't travel very far to begin with (see all the missing features from web apps that native apps get, being discussed on this page.)
Hey, another electron thread. Wait a second, did someone already mention how horrible Javascript is? The memory consumption? The minimal integration into the OS/desktop (think accessibility)? Hmm ok, I need something new... Here it comes: chrome is inherently instable. The Google developers give a shit about their dependency management and have trillions of open source projects just literally copied into their trunk.…
Many of your critics are fallible but I will not spend time arguing, sadly. Yet,what do you think of TypeScript? It's a state of the art language feature wise (for it's rich type system)