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Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

proton-native.js.org

41–50 of 295 posts

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#41

This is super cool. Are there any demonstrations comparing performance between electron and your app?

It seems to runs on "UI" from andlabs, which is a fairly lightweight C wrapper around the the Windows, Cocoa and Gtk API's. Sidenote as for why a UI library would wrap another UI wrapping library, Gtk is what is considered "native" on Gnome based distros. So weight-wise, it's basically comes at the cost of native node module which is not bad compared to Electron's crazy IPC bridge back and forth communication nonsens…

>So weight-wise, it's basically comes at the cost of native node module

And now with NAPI [1] it should be easier than ever to make node modules!

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/n-api.html#n_api_n_api

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#42

This is super cool. Are there any demonstrations comparing performance between electron and your app?

I dont think that'd be very useful. Proton is pretty much native C with just a JS runtime on top, it might even be faster than Qt. So a benchmark against Qt maybe?

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#43
post #22
post #4

> It is not only shorter, it is also easier to read and to edit, and can easily utilize the power of the state. Easier to read and edit is obviously subjective, but shorter is not and that front page is just straight up lying. The Qt example is most definitely shorter. What am I missing?

Hey. I'm the author. It's hard to find a simple example that everyone understands but can show capabilities. If you're used to Qt then you're going to like Qt better, but I mainly developed this for people who want to use React. You are obviously free to use whatever you want. But if you have any suggestions let me know!

I have zero experience with Qt, but I'm pretty sure I can follow along with the examples anyway. (I do have experience with React, JS, and Python.)

It seems to me you're making a syntax comparison and using shorter as an argument for Proton Native, yet the example is obviously not shorter so it's factually incorrect. My suggestion is you don't use shorter as an argument. Aside from being incorrect, it's probably not very useful since a few characters here and there doesn't necessarily mean one is more or less complicated than the other – which I presume is what you're really trying to convey.

I'd probably refrain from using syntax comparison (mostly a matter of preference and familiarity anyway) and instead show why Proton Native is obviously less complex than Qt (or other options, if that matters.)

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#44

> You can create a GUI using something like Qt, but the code to make it is messy and unorganized. Having made a very large GUI myself, it gets very cumbersome to manage all of that. Haven't we moved past writing UIs in code about twenty years ago? I see your code samples, and all they look like is an improved version of the code UI creation we had in OWL, MFC, and other UI frameworks on other platforms. Starting abou…

NIBs in macOS/iOS are horrible for development and code review. Using a UI to build UI is slow and clunky. There is no "moving past" it. That's a bad way to develop stuff. We don't do it with HTML, do we? No.

Agreed that NIBs are terrible, but I've found prefabs in unity to be quite pleasant.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#45

It's pretty fascinating how tech tends to spread and influence. We spent years trying to make the web more like traditional UI dev, and now we're making traditional UI dev like web. I would never have believed this if you'd told me about it in 2010.

> and now we're making traditional UI dev like web It's been like that on Windows since 2006 with XAML. In fact, if you squint at typical JSX, it looks like XAML. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

Xamarin does this pretty well cross platform as well.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#46
post #43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. I'm the author. It's hard to find a simple example that everyone understands but can show capabilities. If you're used to Qt then you're going to like Qt better, but I mainly developed this for people who want to use React. You are obviously free to use whatever you want. But if you have any suggestions let me know!

I have zero experience with Qt, but I'm pretty sure I can follow along with the examples anyway. (I do have experience with React, JS, and Python.) It seems to me you're making a syntax comparison and using shorter as an argument for Proton Native, yet the example is obviously not shorter so it's factually incorrect. My suggestion is you don't use shorter as an argument. Aside from being incorrect, it's probably not…

Oh, I forgot – it's probably worth considering using examples written in the same programming language as well.
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