Electron is Harmful
medium.com
Electron is Harmful
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Electron is Harmful
#2Disclosure: I am heavily invested in NW.JS(which is similar to electron) because my app is written in it.
I think this article complains about a problem, but that problem is not necessarily caused by electron, or electron as a whole. Hear me out. The memory leaks could be bad code in the application itself. If the memory leaks are from electron, the problem still isn't electron as a whole, it's the leaks themselves and should be fixed in the electron code.
> Bottom line; as an end user I really could not care less about how easy it was for you to make the application, if it is not working properly it is not working properly, being slow on today’s super fast hardware is a bug.
Sure you do, by proxy. If it was easier to write, there will be more and better features, which you definitely care about. Therefore, the easier to write, the faster to develop, the more polish and the more value there is. Again, if the problem is performance, then fix the problem, don't curse the whole system.
I find many pro's making NW.JS well worth it. I can fix the performance problems as they arise, and just because developers of certain electron apps don't address performance, does not mean electron as a whole is bad.
Re: Electron is Harmful
#3This again?
Re: Electron is Harmful
#4This again?
Wow are you some sort of mind reader??
Re: Electron is Harmful
#5As someone who doesn't particularly like Electron, I have an honest question: Why all the hate?
Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it?
Yes, it makes it easier to "just use your web developers" instead of hiring native app devs, but how many of those apps would even exist if the only path was to develop a native app?
Electron is too slow for me, so I just stick to e.g. Emacs and Sublime text. Other people get along just fine with Electron, and love VS Code.
Why can't it be fine for people like what works for them?
Re: Electron is Harmful
#6As someone who doesn't particularly like Electron, I have an honest question: Why all the hate? Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it? Yes, it makes it easier to "just use your web developers" instead of hiring native app devs, but how many of those apps would even exist if the only path was to develop a native app? Electron is too slow for me, so I just stick to e.g. Emacs an…
>Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it?
Yes. Is impossed on the users by the developers using it.
Re: Electron is Harmful
#7Any reason why there's not more support for the Progressive Web Apps standard on desktop browsers [1]?
It seems to me that many Electron apps these days (most chat apps: Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, etc) are super-thin wrappers around a web app that don't actually need the full desktop access offered by Electron (things like local filesystem access, multi-process execution, multi-window management, arbitrary node APIs, etc).
They just need a way for users to "install" the app so that it 1) has a separate shortcut and appears in a separate window from the browser, 2) can send notifications through the native notifications stack, and use a fallback on systems where one isn't available, 3) is available for use offline.
The Progressive Web Apps spec has answers to all of these problems, and it would vastly improve the resource usage model compared to Electron because each PWA would share the same browser runtime as the user's browser of choice, which is more likely than not running 24/7 anyways.
I know PWA was designed with mobile apps in mind originally, but it'd be a shame to limit it to that use case, as there is clearly a lot of demand for building desktop apps with web technologies, and PWA sounds like an excellent alternative to the current status quo that's dominated by Electron.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Progressive
Disclaimer: Please excuse me for recycling this old comment, because I do think the idea is still worth spreading.
Re: Electron is Harmful
#8The accessibility that electron has makes it invaluable for me personally. I use it to create tools internally; tools I simply wouldn't otherwise have the time nor capability to create. In this respect, Electron is extremely helpful, not harmful.
While I'd certainly agree that a larger company that's pushing out a production product shouldn't use Electron, calling it harmful overall is like calling 3d printing harmful when injection molds / CNC milled products have a better finish. It's about using the right tool for the right job. Just because it's slow doesn't mean there isn't value in how quickly you can create things in it.
Re: Electron is Harmful
#9As someone who doesn't particularly like Electron, I have an honest question: Why all the hate? Sure, it's slower and less resource-efficient, but is anyone making you use it? Yes, it makes it easier to "just use your web developers" instead of hiring native app devs, but how many of those apps would even exist if the only path was to develop a native app? Electron is too slow for me, so I just stick to e.g. Emacs an…
> Why all the hate?
Because it's simply offensive to me as a computer scientist and software engineer to use most of the resources of a 3GHz processor and 12GB of RAM doing something that really can be easily done with a processor 1000x slower with 1000x less RAM. I'm willing to accept a certain amount of overhead for modern user interfaces and cross-platform capability, but three orders of magnitude wastage is ridiculous. It literally offends me.
Re: Electron is Harmful
#10Articles complaining about electron pop up at least once every month. One thing I always see missing from them is a better idea.
The reason electron is prevalent in businesses nowadays is because it's easy to develop and deliver to customers. Apparently this comes with the price of performance loss.
Please, the next time you feel the need to use your time to write an article about how electron is "cancer", try spending a little bit of time brainstorming a better solution that still fits the bill.