Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

Post by olliej » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

emteycz wrote: post #199

olliej wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how that applies to electron beyond electron bundling an entire copy of chrome in every app. Electron has plenty of non-web APIs, plenty of non-web permissions, etc. You could do exactly the same thing with webkit's APIs.

The comment I replied to wasn't about bundling webkit instead, it was dynamic linking of what's available in the system. That's not possible because each web engine behaves differently, even if somebody reimplemented the non-web apis as a portable native library (actually, these ARE implemented like that). We're bundling whole chrome because it's a reliable abstraction that works the same on all systems.

Post by emteycz » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

olliej wrote: post #201

emteycz wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment I replied to wasn't about bundling webkit instead, it was dynamic linking of what's available in the system. That's not possible because each web engine behaves differently, even if somebody reimplemented the non-web apis as a portable native library (actually, these ARE implemented like that). We're bundling whole chrome because it's a reliable abstraction that works the same on all systems.

Your complaint was about WebKit’s “refusal” to implement standards, where standards generally is whatever chrome announces and then throws onto the web with little to no thought about how the impacts users or user privacy. As a framework, webkit has a stable abi as well which means electron apps would just work with updated system webkit, rather than needing to be rebuilt. Similar for JavaScriptCore vs V8. Unfortunat…

Post by rsynnott » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #16

quantummkv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly due to the fact that unlike Microsoft, Apple is doing a complete migration to ARM. The developers have to migrate to ARM because they cannot just tell users to buy x86 macs like they could do for windows

This sounds correct to my knowledge, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a substantive difference between the Microsoft and Apple ARM transitions that’s not obvious to me.

Post by alwillis » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

gfody wrote: post #183

alwillis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it looks like Apple have taken this opportunity to drop support for alternative OSes entirely. Turns out this isn't true. They showed Debian running in a VM on a prototype Apple Silicon Mac hardware in June at WWDC. My guess is that Apple will provide access to enough hardware features of the M1 Macs via their hypervisor framework, to enable alternative operating systems to run ok. Docker for M1 Macs is…

bootcamp is explicitly not supported on m1 macs - VMs and hypervisors are beside the point. [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252021896

Post by anoncake » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 12:13 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #164

croes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Web technologies are more and more about developer convenience instead of user convenience. Clearly. But I wonder: If electron didn't exist, would e.g.: Slack or Discord applications be native or wouldn't exist at all. I'm quite convinced that the latter is true.