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Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

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Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#261
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to move from VS Code to NeoVim with NerdTree and some other plugins to make it more IDE-like. But eventually wasn't able to get the same code completion, and searching was also a bit more painful. How do you go about that? Would you mind sharing your setup? :)

Hi, I use Neovim with basically the same features as VSCode. I made a video series on how to configure it: https://youtu.be/CcgO_CV3iDo?list=PLu-ydI-PCl0OEG0ZEqLRRuCrM...

Wow looks super promising. Definitely worths a try.

Thanks for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and each application should play nice with the system resources, so even if RAM is cheap and plentiful it doesn't automatically mean that every application should feel entitled to it. Yes, you shouldn't be a bad neighbor, but the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary. RAM is an afterthought for most of these applications for a reason. This attitude is like buying a sports car and never…

> This attitude is like buying a sports car and never redlining it. This is a perfect analogy. To stretch it, the majority of sports car owners are developers. The vast majority of your users are not.

We can play this game, sure.

The vast majority of cars on the road today have more than enough horsepower and can handle being redlined.

Most users have enough RAM unless they're running on some absurdly low 4GB< device, which is just nowhere near as common these days.

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll flip this around. Can you think of any Electron apps that aren’t hugely bloated as examples of Electron-done-right?

I think vscode is pretty good.

Just opened it up and it's... ok. Have 4 files open (all from the same project):

- VSCode itself 453MB

- cpptools (language server under the hood) 573MB

In the mean-time, I've been doing most of my work all day in Emacs and it has bloated up to 126MB :).

Edit: I will admit that the cpptools stuff is very nice. I do most of my C++ work in Emacs, but when I'm dealing with weird template type stuff I'll switch over to VSCode for the nice affordances it offers.

Edit 2: Just tried using VS Code to debug something that I can't quite grok.

    IntelliSense process crash detected.
    IntelliSense process crash detected.
    IntelliSense process crash detected.
Ahhh well, I can't really blame it on this one :D

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#264

Maintainer here – Happy to answer any questions!

I'm really happy to have found this at I'm in the early stages of building an app. My plan is to release a web only version first and then desktop clients later depending on demand.

So, my question is, how much work is there to convert a web app built with Svelte to a Svelte NodeGUI app? Will most things just work, or should I expect to have to rebuild a lot of functionality?

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#265

Maintainer here – Happy to answer any questions!

I'm really happy to have found this at I'm in the early stages of building an app. My plan is to release a web only version first and then desktop clients later depending on demand.

So, my question is, how much work is there to convert a web app built with Svelte to a Svelte NodeGUI app? Will most things just work, or should I expect to have to rebuild a lot of functionality?

Second, my app will make use of WebGL (or possibly WebGPU in the future) and have done wasm components. Do these work with NodeGUI?

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#266

Same demo in VanilaJS and Sciter.JS : https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk (see screenshots there). Binary is ~5MB, and that is HTML/CSS + QuickJS + NodeJS runtime. Versus 50MB+ of NodeGUI that is Node.JS + QT. And SvelteJS works in Sciter.JS out of the box too.

Hi c-smile - i always get confused about the FOSS status of sciter related projects. It's a very promising platform - specially being CSS/HTML/JS at a low resource footprint. I recall a crowd-sourcing campaign to make this toolset fully open - did that succeed? What's the current state? For me a signal to use sciter would be it's inclusion into the debian/ubuntu repository.

The license looks ok:

https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/LICENSE

The only unusual limitation is that you're not allowed to say "built with Sciter" without getting permission from the maintenaners. You can still use it for commercial projects though.

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#267
post #24
post #14

This looks nice ! However... "Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program" : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment )

That blog post does speak to me, but 20MB for a program with a truly functional, modern UI doesn't outrage me that much. IMO there's a tradeoff: we could be writing all our programs in C, still. But it would be enormously difficult and there'd be way more bugs. On the other end of the spectrum we can be lazy, use web tech everywhere and never optimise our ballooning JS codebases. This feels like it's at least somewhe…

It outrages you somewhat?

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think vscode is pretty good.

Just opened it up and it's... ok. Have 4 files open (all from the same project): - VSCode itself 453MB - cpptools (language server under the hood) 573MB In the mean-time, I've been doing most of my work all day in Emacs and it has bloated up to 126MB :). Edit: I will admit that the cpptools stuff is very nice. I do most of my C++ work in Emacs, but when I'm dealing with weird template type stuff I'll switch over to V…

I can't speak about the LSP, other than that that sounds about right to me, maybe you have a lot of free ram or some extensions installed? I would expect the memory usage to be lower than that otherwise.

You can't really compare Emacs with VSCode here, among other things you can basically get vscode to run in the browser without many problems etc. It's like saying that one can edit text with nano which is 150kb, sure but that's only part of what vscode provides you.

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#269
post #14

This looks nice ! However... "Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program" : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment )

One thing is, as someone who develops cross-platform software, you really want font rendering & unicode support to be exactly the same across platforms, so that users don't have a save file that looks one way when opened on a Mac and another way when opened on a Windows.

This means that you can't use the OS provided facilities (as they all have different metrics) and have to bundle good font rendering engines (if you care about non-us-ascii people) - that means already ~7-8 megabytes at the bare minimum for that.

Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

#270
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't use it, its value is almost zero Yet if you use all of it, its value is also zero - to every other program on the same computer. Don't be a dick; Use what you need, not all you can.

This is ridiculous. 20 MB is so far from "all of it" on any modern computer that it makes me question if you're using something from the 90's. How are you even on Hacker News? The reduction of the complex trade-off between memory use, CPU, disk, development environment, ease of deployment, and the dozen other variables that go into a choice like picking what toolkit to use to "don't be a dick" is so absurdly simplist…

> This is ridiculous. 20 MB is so far from "all of it" on any modern computer that it makes me question if you're using something from the 90's.

If I look at today's top seller computers in Amazon for my country (France, 6th economic power in the world), the top two models both come with 4G of RAM (a chromebook, and a win10). The windows one will already use ~2gigs just for the OS. That leaves 2 gigs of RAM for your apps.

And that's for computers being sold today - they will still be in use in five years.

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