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Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

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Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#111
post #39

What M1 giveth, Electron taketh away. Sigh.

If only the issue was limited to Electron... I often feel like Electron is more a declaration of defeat, like: hey no matter where you look at, software bloat keeps eating the precious advances in power provided by hardware. So let's at least get some comfort and value out of that. (Electron does put multiplatform desktop development within reach of 100x more developers than Qt/etc)

As someone who switches between Windows and macOS, I'd rather every app I use be Electron and available on both OS than native and only available on one.

Native does basically nothing for me that matters when it comes to accomplishing things. Just OS lock-in. Loading a little faster or being a little snappier is a small consolation.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#112
post #6

I hope applications like Teams, Discord, and others that have iOS / iPadOS apps allow users to use those rather than electron versions.

I tried to use the JIRA "Catalyst" app (what is JIRA app in the Mac App store) and... it's bad. It's fast, much faster than the web version. But otherwise pretty bad. I kept being frustrated with it too much and switched back to web. And Catalyst is supposed to be "more native" than iOS apps running on macOS directly...

I think Catalyst is basically positioned as a stopgap for iOS developers to get something running on macOS, you can optimise it from there and later split out some code for a specific macOS target.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#113
post #28

i don't recall such support when msft was launching arm based laptops. does anyone have insight to why this is so? is it a case of apple developer relations doing an outstanding job engaging with the community?

Nobody wanted Arm-based Windows devices. The early RT devices had terrible performance and failed to compete in any meaningful way, had terrible compatibility and no (?) emulation, and since the products were mostly terrible, Microsoft never supported them well, nor pushed for a developer transition, and consequently they got abandoned quickly. The few newer devices out there, like the Surface Pro X, still don't perf…

Oddly enough I think it might be possible now that Apple has shown the way. They'll need a good chip though.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#114
post #12

Wondering if we see a few less major electron apps on Apple silicon as companies can share their swift codebases a few different ways.

Very unlikely, they’ll still have 2 codebases and the point of these frameworks is to only write the code once.

I guess it depends a lot on the team and the product, I can see it working in certain scenarios.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#115
post #46
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the M1 can run x86 apps via rosseta 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Judging from history, that support will go away in a few years, like it did with PowerPC Rosetta after the switch to Intel.

Judging from history, that support will go away in a few years, like it did with PowerPC Rosetta after the switch to Intel.

Correct.

Rosetta is a transitional technology to allow x86 apps to run on M-series Macs while their developers work on Universal versions that will run natively on M-series Macs in addition to Intel ones.

Apple has been clear that they expect the transition to M series chips to take about 2 years… a couple of years after that, they'll stop including Rosetta with macOS and will require developers to ship native apps.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#116
post #46
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the M1 can run x86 apps via rosseta 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Judging from history, that support will go away in a few years, like it did with PowerPC Rosetta after the switch to Intel.

On the other hand, Apple supported 68k emulation for roughly 13 years, from the introduction of PowerPC Macs in 1994 to the removal of Classic mode in 2007 (after the Intel transition had already begun).

The removal of Rosetta 1 is widely believed to have been rushed because it depended upon licensed technology. Since Rosetta 2 was an in-house design, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple kept it around considerably longer.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#117
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples to oranges comparison. VS Code is a text editor whereas Xcode and Jetbrains are IDEs. The real comparison should be with Sublime Text vs VS Code. Sublime Text blows VSCode out of water while opening the same project folder. Here's a naive comparison ~/workspace/iOS Project(develop) time subl . ________________________________________________________ Executed in 75.46 millis fish external usr time 21.45 millis…

That's not a fair comparison either. VSCode does way more than Sublime Text. I actually found VSCode closer to Intellij than to Sublime Text.

How is VSCode anything similar to IntelliJ other than they both can edit text and has plugins?

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#118
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on, I use Visual Studio Code daily and it’s really fast? Certainly compared to XCode or Jet Brains IDEs.

That's something I wonder too. What VS Code does right that, let's say Slack, fails on?

Yeah I've also tried to understand this. Tried looking for blog posts on what VS Code is doing but couldn't find one. Can someone point out if there's any?

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#119
post #85

For some reason this announcement gets displayed to me in a unholy mix of French and English: > Electron 11.0.0 est disponible ! It includes upgrades to Chromium 87, V8 8.7, and Node.js 12.18.3. We've added support for Apple silicon, and general improvements. Lisez la suite ci-dessous pour plus de détails ! > La team Electron est excitée d'annoncer la sortie de Electron 11.0.0 ! Vous pouvez l'installer avec npm via n…

It's mix, and the parts written in French are atrocious. Is that an automatically generated translation? I mean "changement de pile" for "stack changes", really? I had to pause to understand the sentence. I'd prefer websites to stop pushing half assed translation and just serve English if they don't have the resources to translate properly.

> I'd prefer websites to stop pushing half assed translation and just serve English if they don't have the resources to translate properly.

I'd also prefer websites stop deciding to serve me a certain translation based on their often poorly-guessed geolocation rather than my browser language.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is a messy one page app developed by PHP programmers and vscode is open source and actually made by competent people.

Slack is really weird. It seems like they would have the resources to do native applications. I can't fault anyone for doing an Electron app as a demo, prototype, MVP, that's seems completely reasonable. What I don't get is why they don't want to make a native macOS client, or Windows client. For Linux I get that they don't necessarily know if it should be GTK, QT, should they adopt KDE standards or Gnome, something…

Especially considering they already have a good iOS Client with their iPad app!
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