Only a matter of months before VSCode will not be an electron app anymore.
React Native for Windows and Mac
361–370 of 505 posts
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sad for developers. What I had in mind regarding desktop were big tools like Blender, Photoshop, Blender, IntelliJ IDEs, which existed long before Electron. I think it clearly shows that complex UI apps require cross platform UI, or will remain single platform (Xcode, Visual Studio).
Let me tell you a story... I was at a crossroads in 2008. I had been developing mostly in C for a decade and decided to pivot to being your standard “Enterprise Dev”. I had a choice between moving my career to C# or Java. I chose C# partly because of the bad stench of the cross platform Java IDEs at the time. Give me VS or Xcode any day over a Java based IDE. Photoshop definitely isn’t using a non native runtime. I d…
Can't speak for VS but XCode is a pig.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adobe Flex was my most productive client development experience over the past 20 years. I transitioned to Android _but_ there were many hideous things with that (e.g. ghastly emulator, legacy Java support etc.). My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoeh…
Ahhhh Adobe Flex with MXML and ActionScript3. Before Typescript and React with JSX got popular that was the cool kids club. RIAs yo! Rich internet applications. I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
It lives on in web APIs
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML is half of the problem, the DOM is just fundamentally unsuited for app UI rendering, and CSS is a nightmare when applied to UI controls rather than text documents. What we need is a cross platform well-thought-out scene graph like Flash had or Flutter (kinda) has.
> the DOM is just fundamentally unsuited for app UI rendering... Consider the following: Native UI: is a tree of widgets. Each widget has sematic properties / attributes. Each widget may have style properties (colors ,fonts, etc.). Each widget has exactly on parent and may have multiple children. There is an API for all of these. HTML/DOM UI: Same as above, just replace "widget" by "element". Could you explain then w…
HTML is for document/flow.
Only with flexbox it became kind of usable for "apps". But still, the widgets are not native. You can keep emulating and emulating, but it's very easy to spot and quite frankly super annoying.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#365I asked this on a previous React Native thread, and I’m still curious: is RN (on mobile, as that’s where it’s currently used) actually faster than something like PhoneGap? Are there any benchmarks or demos? Anyone got any anecdotes of a like-for-like comparison? I’m skeptical (though certainly willing to be convinced) because RN runs your JS application in a separate thread from the UI, with a rather expensive bridge…
Yes its faster, for majority of cases.
But if you overload the bridge, you not only hit a bottleneck, you hit an async bottleneck between your UI code and native. Very rare for that to happen in my experience, and well worth the trade-off.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
VSCode is a great example. We’ve already established that the average joe out there doesn’t care about whether an app is implemented in electron or not. But VSCode’s success at the expense of every other editor out there indicates that even developers don’t care that much. The important thing is features - which VSCode has, and the speed at which those features are developed and deployed on all platforms - where VSCo…
The day Microsoft releases Rust support for Visual Studio, VSCode gets kicked out of my PC. Also, I wonder how much the Electron love overlapps with VSCode, after all many of those developers were pushing for Atom before VSCode was born.
Not much, at least here. I was a Sublime Text user for years. I tried Atom but it was an ugly, janky mess. I switched to VScode quickly after its release because the features it provided over Sublime Text were worth it, and the performance was good enough, even though not on par with ST.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most native apps I've downloaded are well into tens or hundreds megabytes. I just tried a few big popular sites with caching off and none of them downloaded more than a couple megabytes of javascript. I'm really skeptical of the popular wisdom around here that web dev is doing something especially egregious when it comes to build sizes or dependencies.
Slack: usually ~300MiB of RAM for one account. The Ripcord [1] Slack/Discord client written in C++ and Qt: currently using 33MiB. Qt is not the native toolkit on Windows/Mac, but Qt apps typically follow platform conventions far better than Electron apps. This also voids the argument "we need Electron, because it reduces development costs, and we can get truly cross-platform apps". Ripcord is written by a single indi…
People don’t care. The vast majority of people don’t ever use their computers for anything heavy, so it’s not like saving a few hundred mb of ram is going to be noticeable for them. It’d be nice to have a lighter, more performant app but if the cost is that it looks like what you posted (no offence to the dev of ripcord; IMO qt and gtk stuff always just looks super outdated) then I’d bet most people would prefer the more modern/pretty looking app.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#368I tried using this a few months ago, as well as React Native for mobile and React Native Web for web, and I felt like they were all just hacks glued together to get cross-platform support, and RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge. Build dependencies and packages were a nightmare, things continuously broke. I tried Flutter afterwards and it just felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything "just…
> RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge "Native" doesn't describe the programming language, but the GUI layer. Native == non-web-browser.
The GUI layer in a static sense. You can't have native realtime interactions with the GUI, for instance dragging and interactive animations.
You can choose one of two things:
1) Run a single precomputed action or animation in native-land when receiving an event from JS. No interaction is possible.
2) Run a requestAnimationFrame loop in JS which is passing the bridge (6 API calls on Android - 3 layers per direction) 60-120 times per second in async mode. Enjoy the jank.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
The day Microsoft releases Rust support for Visual Studio, VSCode gets kicked out of my PC. Also, I wonder how much the Electron love overlapps with VSCode, after all many of those developers were pushing for Atom before VSCode was born.
Not much, at least here. I was a Sublime Text user for years. I tried Atom but it was an ugly, janky mess. I switched to VScode quickly after its release because the features it provided over Sublime Text were worth it, and the performance was good enough, even though not on par with ST.
And me thinking that it was probably about those $80.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#370React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native From my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle…
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