Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

Post by vkoskiv » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #132

TameAntelope wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm both sad and confused about why there are so many negative comments about Electron, when I happily use Electron apps every day of my life and have no complaints at all about them. In fact, I'd like to start building Electron apps of my own, it actually looks like a ton of fun! What is the experience I'm missing?

It is certainly possible to make high quality, well behaved software with Electron (VS Code is great), but it takes a hell of a lot of work, and seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Look at Teams for example. The Electron desktop app is a slow, buggy, resource sucking mess. A video call with one person reduces my laptop battery from 8 hours to 2, fans going at full tilt the entire time. It uses its own not…

Post by 411111111111111 » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

croes wrote: post #126

yoz-y wrote: post #68

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Given that a run of the mill game weights north of 50 gigs, I don't think an additional 100 or so megs per app would be noticeable.

It's a difference if I have a 50GB game with high res textures or a simple app with 100MB which as a native app would only need less than 1MB. Web technologies are more and more about developer convenience instead of user convenience.

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 11:41 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #135

mrweasel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They have to build and maintain the web version regardless. Why also write individual clients for Windows, Mac and Linux when they can simply wrap the website in a thin desktop wrapper and call it a day?

Post by reissbaker » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 12:05 PM UTC

shrew wrote: post #141

reissbaker wrote: post #125

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I use it daily on multi-million LOC projects and it's just fine...

Out of interest, what language are your projects written in? I've had to work on C# .NET codebases of that size and have had the same issues as the previous response. VSCode itself doesn't fall over, but code completion and error highlighting are painfully slow to catch up and several of the extensions that provide that functionality regularly crash out.

Post by benhurmarcel » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #111

Jare wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.