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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#581

Post by mbrodersen »

Subsentient wrote: post #271
mbrodersen wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument seems to be that bad developers write bad software? Isn’t that true no matter the platform? I have written equally successful software in both Electron and Qt. In my experience, a competent developer can write great software given almost any platform.

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost…

The only problem I had with Electron was the slow booting time. Other than that it worked fine. I didn’t see any more bugs than I see on any other platform. Perhaps the problem was that you are very familiar with Qt and not with Electron? I am not saying that Electron is perfect. I don’t think any platform is. But it seems to me that (again) the problem you are describing is that bad developers will write bad code on any platform. And yes a lot of inexperienced developers know JavaScript so they are attracted to Electron and write bad code. Completely agree. But I think it is unfair to blame Electron for that. Just saying :)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#582

Post by mbrodersen »

spuz wrote: post #457
Subsentient wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost…

> If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays Could you elaborate on that? Isn't using the native GUI API of the OS a relatively sensible default, especially if you aren't targeting multiple OSes? If you definitely want cross-platform support, I can see the argument for choosing one of the cross-platform fr…

Qt is a great choice for writing multi-platform desktop apps. It would take a lot longer, and add unnecessary complexity, to write the UI specifically for each platform.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#583

Post by BeefWellington »

tester34 wrote: post #434
BeefWellington wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development. What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.

>What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance. What makes you think that Slack's loading times is due to Electron, not shitty backend? This is genuine question

If it were the backend, I would not expect the load times to improve when loading Slack into a browser tab where its resources are constrained.

Separately, if it were strictly a Slack problem and not Electron, you wouldn't expect to see these kinds of issues crop up across the spectrum of Electron apps. Scroll through this thread and you can see a variety of people running into these problems in all kinds of different electron-based apps:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/12988

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#584

Post by Nasrudith »

pydry wrote: post #494
jack_pp wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)

They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.

You don't get to be a billion dollar company by spending money unnecessarily. The question is never the total size of the company the cost relative to other options.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#585

Post by Nasrudith »

stainforth wrote: post #347
clusterfish wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

Didn't Microsoft get its hand slapped for trying to integrate the web-compatible aspect into its OS?

I thought it was that it was the browser as part of the OS which was the issue from being priveledged in performance (regardless of security concerns).

I conjecture that if the alt-universe Microsoft could have dodged that bullet via different code structuring. If there was a "HTMLReader.dll" available which handled the HTML page display rendering If Internet Explorer, its help file reader, and any other implementer of the API could use it there would be no antitrust issue because it doesn't technically priveledge their own applications. Not a lawyer but it would be interesting to know if I am right or where I went wrong.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#587

Post by danaris »

_xnmw wrote: post #412
phailhaus wrote: post #85

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…

I'm a webdev, I've done nothing but full-stack web development for the past 10 years, and I mostly agree with this guy. I hate Electron garbage, the slowness is infuriating. I hate SPAs and React, it's unnecessary abstraction overhead in 90% of the projects I've seen it used in. The only thing I don't agree with him about is PHP, because the benefits provided by abstracting routing and templating into a "proper" fram…

I'm more or less on the same page with you—and it's worth noting that the things we agree with him on are where the extra burden is placed on the client side, while the places we disagree are where the extra burden is placed on the server side.

If you can make sure your server is fast enough that the client never notices a difference, it shouldn't matter whether you're using Apache's built-in routing or Symfony's PHP routing.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#588

Post by godDLL »

razemio wrote: post #371
godDLL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add raspi to your cross platform list. Now tell me how VScode runs. Kinda crap, is it not? Barely usable. And how do we fix that? We can't. I mean it's not a Commodore. It's a raspi. It streams 4K video and decodes it onto your projector on the fly. But editing code using a popular solution is not any good.

Funny that you mention this. I run it perfectly on my raspi 3 using code-server on home assistent. Now please tell me, what is a better IDE then vscode for a raspi 3? It barely uses any ram on the server side. Wouldn't it have been written in electron the code-server project would not be possible. Using a raspi not as a headless device when programming is a stretch. So the only IDEs that come to my mind are vim, emac…

> Wouldn't it have been written in electron the code-server project would not be possible.

Please clarify what is so special about Electron in that case. It was so slow they had to do it that way, is that what you're saying?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#589

Post by 2143 »

nmstoker wrote: post #215
n8cpdx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as th…

Lots of tools are better as websites - however underhand motives often mean mobile apps get pushed more and have done for years. Inevitably someone pops up to say "but what about essential feature X that you can't do well on the web" even though it's rarely genuinely essential or it's a worthwhile trade-off. My GP surgery uses a fantastic website for streamlining comms where you'd never want to install an app that wo…

Yes I have felt this before.

There are plenty of native mobile apps out there that are better off as web apps.

If it's a service that people use constantly, then there may be some merits in using an app.

But more often that not there are plenty of things people use once-in-a-long-while that should probably be just a website.

For instance I know a place (outside the US, not naming the place because that's not relevant) that has a mobile app just to highlight the local tourist spots. It just shows pictures and text description. There's no AR/VR stuff or anything. Neither can it reserve tickets for any of those places. In my opinion that should just have been a static website!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#590

Post by Siira »

tanseydavid wrote: post #556
pydry wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.

...and one PM to manage all 4 teams and ensure that there is no feature-drift between the various OS-target versions. I am really just trying to emphasize that there are tradeoffs lurking everywhere and they are often hidden by assumptions.

Telegram already does this with a rather small team. Hell, there are even third-party Telegram clients that, while a bit behind the features, eventually catch up with every single one.
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