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Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#71

Post by pqs »

pantulis wrote: post #70
shp0ngle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack took great pains to make the client not be a memory and CPU hog. Still better than Teams though. (Which is also in Electron.)

You can also see the pains the Evernote team took from the initial Electron-based 10 release until it became usable again. But you could also feel the product moving again after stagnation on a gazillion native clients. It was the right albeit mostly final engineering decision they took.

It surely was the right decision, but it came too late.

Also, still the app is almost worthless on my Android phone. Too slow, despite large improvement.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#72

Post by mmgutz »

zhs wrote: post #2

Honest question, when solutions like https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri exist out there that promise smaller build sizes and similar developer experiences, are folks still using Electron to build new apps?

Tauri and similar are only as good as the webviews on the system. My trials with webview based alternatives showed they use slightly less ram as electron at startup, but later use more memory and perform worse in FPS. (Linux)

Not really seeing an advantage other than a smaller binary.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#73

Post by trollied »

PriceDev wrote: post #68

I love HN because it opens up a dichotomy of views. Optimistic: It is cheaper, as in time and cost, way to build products that users can enjoy and newer developers that only know web technologies can tip toe into platform apps. Pessimistic: It’s not optimal and eats resources. Me: I use it to build internal tools and don’t work on a potato so it can have all the resources it wants with my overkill machine. Guess I’m…

What really gets me is using web technologies in operating systems. Press the Windows key in Windows 11, and watch the start menu crawl & flicker up the screen. It should be rendered natively & buttery smooth. But no.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#74

Post by fauigerzigerk »

synergy20 wrote: post #16

I struggled between Flutter and Electronjs, checked at Tauri too. Electronjs does the 3 Desktops (linux,windows,macos). Tuari is new, serves the same user base, smaller, but you need learn Rust. Flutter does 3 Desktops and 2 Mobile platforms(android,ios), but you need learn Dart. While doing my own research, I eventually chose Flutter, reasons are: * it does 5 platforms fairly well * its user base keeps rising rapidl…

Flutter is unsuitable for anything that runs on battery and needs text input.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#75

Post by jatins »

rvz wrote: post #30
synergy20 wrote: post #16

I struggled between Flutter and Electronjs, checked at Tauri too. Electronjs does the 3 Desktops (linux,windows,macos). Tuari is new, serves the same user base, smaller, but you need learn Rust. Flutter does 3 Desktops and 2 Mobile platforms(android,ios), but you need learn Dart. While doing my own research, I eventually chose Flutter, reasons are: * it does 5 platforms fairly well * its user base keeps rising rapidl…

I don't see the problem with using Flutter. It has proper support from Google for all the major OSes for both Desktop and Mobile. A worthy and serious alternative to both Electron and React Native. It sits in the middle of being faster and smaller than Electron, and being more easier to pick up than Rust with Tauri. I would rather build a desktop and mobile app using Dart with Flutter than with Rust using Tauri, espe…

Are there any popular Flutter apps in the wild?

The most popular one I have seen is Indian Google Pay (which is different from global Google pay afaik) and that app has terrible performance even on a high end device like Pixel.

Coin by Zerodha (India's biggest stock broker) is also on Flutter but again, has sluggish scrolling.

Curious if this is true for other Flutter apps in the wild or just my experience.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#76

Post by jatins »

avx56 wrote: post #15

Please can Electron die already? Almost every Electron program I use could be a PWA. Slack has no reason to need another browser engine running. You could make a point for native integration, but there is none. And all it does is display text (and images). What a world we live in. Worse is better, amirite?

It might if Apple or Microsoft provided good frameworks for building native apps.

I read a comment[0] by a developer who used SwiftUI for his app

> What took me 15 minutes on the web, it could take a day on SwiftUI.

It's just not possible for indie devs (or startups) to put that sort of time into native apps. Not to mention SwiftUI is still extremely broken despite being available for 3 years. Quoting from that article

> Every major iOS / macOS upgrade, I have to refactor my code because something crashes the new version. Imagine this happened on the browser.

At this point, unless Apple and MS provide a good component based abstraction for building native UIs (SwiftUI is a step in that direction) developers will keep going to Electron and other alternatives which let them write React (or svelte or even Flutter in the non-web land -- anything that lets them get actual work done)

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-session-a-productiv...

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#77

Post by gbear605 »

jiggunjer wrote: post #60
samsquire wrote: post #57

I don't underestimate the sheer amount of cognitive effort, money and time needed to maintain native versions of software. Or to build a desktop application at all! From my perspective Thunderbird, IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome are extremely complicated pieces of software. My initial exposure to Qt is that it is a very difficult framework to use properly to build nontrivial applications. Not only do you have the barebone…

Spoken like a dev, not a user. Try using older hardware if you really want to understand the other side.

Yep! For another area, it’s very difficult to use any Electron app with OS-built-in voice control, while almost all native apps work fine.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#78

Post by throwaway4aday »

trollied wrote: post #73
PriceDev wrote: post #68

I love HN because it opens up a dichotomy of views. Optimistic: It is cheaper, as in time and cost, way to build products that users can enjoy and newer developers that only know web technologies can tip toe into platform apps. Pessimistic: It’s not optimal and eats resources. Me: I use it to build internal tools and don’t work on a potato so it can have all the resources it wants with my overkill machine. Guess I’m…

What really gets me is using web technologies in operating systems. Press the Windows key in Windows 11, and watch the start menu crawl & flicker up the screen. It should be rendered natively & buttery smooth. But no.

I'm not sure if the use of web technologies in the start menu is the cause of this. I thought it had to do with their search indexing or the lack of it so it winds up crawling a bunch of unindexed folders every time you open the menu.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#79

Post by synergy20 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #47
Ygg2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see one huge problem with Flutter. It's supported by Google. And uses Dart, which is also supported by Google. And sees very little use outside it.

Agreed; Dart seems like a dead end, let alone compared to Rust or Go.

golang is also by google the same as dart though

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#80

Post by synergy20 »

jatins wrote: post #75
rvz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem with using Flutter. It has proper support from Google for all the major OSes for both Desktop and Mobile. A worthy and serious alternative to both Electron and React Native. It sits in the middle of being faster and smaller than Electron, and being more easier to pick up than Rust with Tauri. I would rather build a desktop and mobile app using Dart with Flutter than with Rust using Tauri, espe…

Are there any popular Flutter apps in the wild? The most popular one I have seen is Indian Google Pay (which is different from global Google pay afaik) and that app has terrible performance even on a high end device like Pixel. Coin by Zerodha (India's biggest stock broker) is also on Flutter but again, has sluggish scrolling. Curious if this is true for other Flutter apps in the wild or just my experience.

https://flutter.dev/ does have an impressive list of apps, though I'm unaware any existing long-standing popular apps are rewritten in Flutter, it's more about 'if you want to write a cross platform apps today, which framework you will pick'
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