So is it Chromium-based or not? "which makes it CPU- and memory-efficient when compared to other Chromium-based solutions like Electron"
Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
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Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#22This looks nice ! However... "Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program" : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment )
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#23So is it Chromium-based or not? "which makes it CPU- and memory-efficient when compared to other Chromium-based solutions like Electron"
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#24This looks nice ! However... "Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program" : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment )
IMO there's a tradeoff: we could be writing all our programs in C, still. But it would be enormously difficult and there'd be way more bugs. On the other end of the spectrum we can be lazy, use web tech everywhere and never optimise our ballooning JS codebases. This feels like it's at least somewhere in the middle.
OT but a bone to pick with that article:
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT.
That isn't what my text editor is doing, though. It's doing autocomplete suggestions, linting code as I type... all sorts of things we never had a couple of decades ago and are huge productivity boosters. Sometimes I feel like people forget that.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the case, yes – the UI runtime is Qt5 (which is rendered using low-level graphics APIs, so we class it as “native” – mostly in contrast to WebView-based UIs), and it’s the same API regardless of which platform you’re running on.
I saw Qt and immediately understood what you were trying to say, but for the record: That’s not what native means. Native means “uses the platform widgets and drawing/theming api” and Qt is not native: it actually draws its own widgets (for the most part with certain exceptions on certain platforms) that are drawn to mimic the system UI with subtle differences. If the system UI implementation suddenly changes (say wi…
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw Qt and immediately understood what you were trying to say, but for the record: That’s not what native means. Native means “uses the platform widgets and drawing/theming api” and Qt is not native: it actually draws its own widgets (for the most part with certain exceptions on certain platforms) that are drawn to mimic the system UI with subtle differences. If the system UI implementation suddenly changes (say wi…
Is Qt considered native when you use KDE and not native when you use GNOME? Is Qt 3 considered not native when you use a KDE release that uses Qt 4 under the hood?
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#27This looks nice ! However... "Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program" : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment )
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#28Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#29I envision something where you can just use your regular web app, have the user install the "Desktop Connector" which would be listening at say, port 8000 - then your web app can talk to the desktop via those APIs, instead of installing an Electron or related.
I must be missing/forgetting something crucial since that seems like the most straightforward solution imaginable.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#30Maintainer here – Happy to answer any questions!
I know QT is dual licensed for application development. How's the licensing here?
Atul is licensing NodeGUI as MIT, so I’m licensing Svelte NodeGUI as MIT accordingly.