61–70 of 201 posts
checkout how conformant QuickJS is with the modern ES standards https://test262.report/ (especially compared with other engines developed by big teams and companies behind them) Fabrice Bellard is a genius, and I really don't like using this word.
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Given the author wants to release Sciter under GPL, unless twice as many funds are raised, I fail to see the incentive for any company to fund this. GPL + commercial licensing model changes nothing for commercial product developers.
$200k is still chump change to these companies. Probably Github has paid a multitude to that to the team of employed electron devs already, and that's just for the work of wrapping CEF with a js layer. Sciter on the other hand is an entire HTML engine. As the new evolutionary step beyond electron, I think it deserves that money. Even a million dollars would be still a deal.
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 exe…
Webview2 on Windows is also going through a weird period where you can't rely on it "just working" without the end user installing a runtime.
There is a thread, long ago here on HN, where the developer who made the Slack transition from native webviews per platform (which it was, originally, and everyone conveniently forgets) to Electron. He notes it was specifically because cross-platform issues become a pain in the ass to deal with, and Electron avoids that.
There's a disconnect between the average HN commentator who builds a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, and the types of frontends that larger applications build in those languages. Cross platform stuff shows up, and it's not a great use of time when there's one runtime sitting there that does everything and looks the same everywhere.
What prevents me from even looking at this link is the 4.5MB executable. Come on. Have you tried to download that amount of data using a spotty mobile connection?
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.
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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.
I've already pledged. Helping in avoiding making Chromium the default is icing on top of the cake. Edit: I also want a massively cut down, blazingly fast rendering engine for a subset of html that is big enough for Wikipedia. Specifically I want it to be paired with a strictly limited version of something like Javascript, only limited and with batteries included. Dynamically updating content on user clicks should be…
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…
This is the kind of project that I'd hope the Linux Foundation or similar could take an interest in financing too. Until, at least, all major modern OSes come with a built in scriptable headless browser engine, which would be a game-changer. Something-like-electron-or-sciter where you don't have to download the runtime for each individual application. Also, of course, not a walled garden: the windows "modern apps" st…
Ah, yes. Internet Explorer, they called it. Built right into the OS. A game changer. Funny how the meaning of something (goodness/badness/motives/...) can change as circumstances change.
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…
This is the kind of project that I'd hope the Linux Foundation or similar could take an interest in financing too. Until, at least, all major modern OSes come with a built in scriptable headless browser engine, which would be a game-changer. Something-like-electron-or-sciter where you don't have to download the runtime for each individual application. Also, of course, not a walled garden: the windows "modern apps" st…
Basically we have 2 days to make Sciter open-source (GPL or MIT, depending on the amount collected). I think landing a mature cross-platform desktop app framework which is not beholden to any browser vendors is a huge goal. It will have significant consequences for the desktop app ecosystems on all major platforms. Please take part.
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Arguments like these are a lot more compelling when they include some specific features that are missing. Too often, "includes everything you need for free!" translates to "weighs down your binary with a hundred megabytes of functionality no one actually uses."
What electronjs brings is cross platform deployment. This is not a small feature.