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Electron is Harmful

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Re: Electron is Harmful

#21

Post by helixten »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #7

Any 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,…

I think pwa can replace many election app, MS thinks so too they are allowing them in the app store.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#22

Post by scarface74 »

shampto3 wrote: post #10

Articles 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 spendi…

Sure the solution is simple, spend the money and write a native app. It's not a new solution.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#23

Post by dreamcompiler »

ac29 wrote: post #20
dreamcompiler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ridic…

Perhaps you're being hyperbolic, but can you give an example of an application that runs more or less the same functionality and performance on a 30 MHz processor with 12MB RAM (a high end computer from the early 1990s) as a 3GHz processor with 12GB of RAM (a high end computer from 2017)?

I'm guessing you're not very old. Interleaf on an original MC68000 Sun workstation. The Symbolics Genera IDE. Pretty much every app on an Amiga or Mac II circa 1990. Most of these apps were more responsive and more capable than Electron with single cores and 1/1000 the resources. Making clickable animated widgets on a windowed screen that tightly integrate with the OS doesn't (or shouldn't) take much software. But we seem to have forgotten that.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#24

Post by isaiahg »

shampto3 wrote: post #10

Articles 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 spendi…

I haven't tried them yet but I've heard good things about javafx and sciter. Sciter especially looks like a nice replacement for electron.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#25

Post by isaiahg »

wilkystyle wrote: post #5

As 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…

I understand the hate. It solves the problem like hammering a nail with a wrecking ball. But having said that, I'm actually using it right now. Mostly because I already know when development and I don't really have the time to learn GUI libraries, also I can get up and running with a workable UI in less than a day with electron. However I just discovered sciter and might use it for my next project.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#26

Post by _hao »

Electron apps could be resource hogs, but VSCode is my favorite editor by far! I don't care if it'll load 1 second later. Same goes for others like Slack, Discord, Spotify. I want them to look the same everywhere I use them. I just don't care if I'll wait a bit longer for the window to show up.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#27

Post by Derbasti »

wilkystyle wrote: post #5

As 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…

I have a Surface 3. It has enough memory for my web browser, but not much more. Atom is out of the question, Spotify grinds it to a halt, slack is a horrible experience.

But you know what works great? Emacs, a shell, Python, video players, bittorrent, ffmpeg. I. e. native apps.

Well, that sucks for me, right? I could just hop on my 64 GB, 32-thread desktop PC right? As a matter of fact, I could, because I am an entitled white western dude. But the rest of the world can't. I wonder how the Atom vs Emacs debate plays out in China or India or Africa.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#28

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

shampto3 wrote: post #10

Articles 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 spendi…

Depending on your needs, there are quite a few of them. For smaller or non-commercial projects, you can use the free version of Delphi. Creating a native desktop app is superfast. The downside is that if you need multiplatform support you need to pay. If you care about Windows, you can just use Visual Studio and one of the languages included.

If, however, you want a free tool to rapidly create multiplatform apps, I think the only real contender is Lazarus. It has some rough edges at places, but it works quite well, you can construct medium-complexity apps quite easily, and it's really fast.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#29

Post by AstralStorm »

isaiahg wrote: post #24
shampto3 wrote: post #10

Articles 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 spendi…

I haven't tried them yet but I've heard good things about javafx and sciter. Sciter especially looks like a nice replacement for electron.

JavaFX is a actually pretty terrible and underdeveloped. On and off development and relatively low availability still.

Re: Electron is Harmful

#30

Post by TheCoreh »

jsnar wrote: post #19
TheCoreh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's true, electron apps very rarely provide unrestricted web browsing of untrusted content. They're usually locked to a single domain, or load their entire interface from local files.

This doesn't make it safe -- consider a lower level library inside Chromium can be exploited when processing input data. Your chat app can be exploited by receiving a crafted image. This actually happened in image processing library and network library in Chromium.

Sure, but the same can happen to whatever libraries you use on your native app. If anything Chromium is more likely to be patched, since there's a large entity interested in keeping it secure enough for accessing untrusted content.
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