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ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

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Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#21

Post by barumi »

benatkin wrote: post #15
barumi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a collosal red flag.

It depends on what you're looking for. It's similar to other third-party component libraries out there. There are open source and closed source ones. With the closed source ones you can take a leap of faith and trust the developer of the project, how it's documented, what it does, and decide whether or not to use it. If you submit to an app store, they can decide whether to approve it. There are closed-source third-p…

> It depends on what you're looking for.

Security, for starters.

There is no way around this.

> It's similar to other third-party component libraries out there. There are open source and closed source ones.

You're trying to side-step the fact that a random user uploaded binaries that were crafted to do god knows what to the host's computer in a way that circumvents basic auditing and security checks, and did so while hijacking/piggybacking on popular software projects.

You can try to spin this any way you want, but you need to be crazy to download and run these binaries as there is zero assurance they are not malware.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#23

Post by ksec »

ptrott2017 wrote: post #14

Sciter is a very nice engine with a solid API/SDK and rock solid engineering behind it. For developers building efficient UI apps it can be a real alternative method to things like electron or as a lighter alternative to QT with QML script. However until now it was only available under commercial licence. Andrew Fedoniouk ( a.k.a. c-smile Sciter's original developer) has a kickstarter to fund open sourcing and suppor…

For $100K in total, a tiny marketing budget those companies could have shown some good will towards Open Source.

I wonder if the author actually contacted those companies. That is less than $3K from each of those customers listed.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#25

Post by dmitriid »

ksec wrote: post #23
ptrott2017 wrote: post #14

Sciter is a very nice engine with a solid API/SDK and rock solid engineering behind it. For developers building efficient UI apps it can be a real alternative method to things like electron or as a lighter alternative to QT with QML script. However until now it was only available under commercial licence. Andrew Fedoniouk ( a.k.a. c-smile Sciter's original developer) has a kickstarter to fund open sourcing and suppor…

For $100K in total, a tiny marketing budget those companies could have shown some good will towards Open Source. I wonder if the author actually contacted those companies. That is less than $3K from each of those customers listed.

Those customers probably couldn't care less about open sourcing somebody else's work.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#26

Post by dmitriid »

gitgud wrote: post #20
gigel82 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the author was trying to crowd-fund open-sourcing this project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/c-smile/open-source-sci... I think we'd be better off trying to slim down Chromium or reviving the idea of using the built-in OS WebView control (which is mostly Chromium nowadays anyway), at least that would be a standard web environment.

Under the Kickstarter information: > "...Some of these directions better suit Open Source development model for many reasons." So they want $100,000 to give people the source code. Then they're saying it will suit Open Source Development (also requesting free labour from the community).... this is a red flag

They want $100,000 to fund work on open sourcing code that people will then use for free.

As far as red flags go, educate yourself: open source work is unsustainable without external sources of income: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#29

Post by edko »

Klonoar wrote: post #4

Please, please stop comparing built in platform webviews and alternatives like Sciter to Electron. You can hate on Electron all you want (I do too) but it's a totally different beast to almost all these other solutions. It's all fun and games until you realize that to get half the junk Electron throws you for free, you'll wind up building it yourself in these solutions.

It depends on the application. I did a couple of projects with Rust's web-view crate (which uses native Safari on MacOS, and native Edge on Windows). This gave me access to the full JS and the full Rust ecosystem. I think the possibilities were richer than if I had used Electron alone. For example, I was able to use the Tantivy crate, for very fast and powerful full-text search. All of this with a fraction of the executable size.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#30

Post by nly »

jblazevic wrote: post #8

What I find very interesting here is the QuickJS engine used in this. Developed by none other than Fabrice Bellard!

Very much in the same vein as Duktape[0]. It looks like Duktape is smaller and has a more useful standard library, but is slower and doesn't support ES2020 features.

https://duktape.org/index.html

https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html

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