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Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

electronjs.org

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61–70 of 104 posts

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#61

Post by Kiro »

bboygravity wrote: post #42
matt_holden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Figma, Linear, Notion, Slack, Superhuman, Pitch, Loom. All Electron. I’ve never understood the hate Electron gets on HN, when it powers so many great products that users love.

I don't think you realize how slow those are, how slow they make your entire machine (eating the RAM for no good reason) and how insanely fast similar apps could be if written in something that doesn't involve massive bloat. Electron is also how Microsoft essentially broke Skype (on purpose?) IMO. For me Electron just stands for lazy companies/devs who are not interested in producing something elegant that runs as fa…

Cool. I'm a single developer releasing software for free which is only made possible by Electron and wouldn't exist without it but I guess I'm just lazy.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#62

Post by Kiro »

avx56 wrote: post #15

Please can Electron die already? Almost every Electron program I use could be a PWA. Slack has no reason to need another browser engine running. You could make a point for native integration, but there is none. And all it does is display text (and images). What a world we live in. Worse is better, amirite?

Good luck releasing a PWA on Steam. Do you think Vampire Survivors would be so popular if it only existed as a web page?

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#63

Post by phist_mcgee »

rvz wrote: post #30
synergy20 wrote: post #16

I struggled between Flutter and Electronjs, checked at Tauri too. Electronjs does the 3 Desktops (linux,windows,macos). Tuari is new, serves the same user base, smaller, but you need learn Rust. Flutter does 3 Desktops and 2 Mobile platforms(android,ios), but you need learn Dart. While doing my own research, I eventually chose Flutter, reasons are: * it does 5 platforms fairly well * its user base keeps rising rapidl…

I don't see the problem with using Flutter. It has proper support from Google for all the major OSes for both Desktop and Mobile. A worthy and serious alternative to both Electron and React Native. It sits in the middle of being faster and smaller than Electron, and being more easier to pick up than Rust with Tauri. I would rather build a desktop and mobile app using Dart with Flutter than with Rust using Tauri, espe…

The lack of native scrolling really kills it for me.

Something just feels "off" when using a flutter app.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#64

Post by ninepoints »

avx56 wrote: post #15

Please can Electron die already? Almost every Electron program I use could be a PWA. Slack has no reason to need another browser engine running. You could make a point for native integration, but there is none. And all it does is display text (and images). What a world we live in. Worse is better, amirite?

Err, tray icons? Filesystem access/watches? Registry? Process API? Native plugins? If _every_ Electron program you use could strictly be a PWA, that says more about your usage than Electron itself.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#65

Post by croes »

zhs wrote: post #2

Honest question, when solutions like https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri exist out there that promise smaller build sizes and similar developer experiences, are folks still using Electron to build new apps?

If the OS webview gets breaking changes your tauri app breaks too.

Electron bundles the browser therefore the size.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#66

Post by mkl »

heapwolf wrote: post #38
synergy20 wrote: post #16

I struggled between Flutter and Electronjs, checked at Tauri too. Electronjs does the 3 Desktops (linux,windows,macos). Tuari is new, serves the same user base, smaller, but you need learn Rust. Flutter does 3 Desktops and 2 Mobile platforms(android,ios), but you need learn Dart. While doing my own research, I eventually chose Flutter, reasons are: * it does 5 platforms fairly well * its user base keeps rising rapidl…

There is also a brand new one called Socket which is similar to Tauri but doesn’t require knowing any Rust. It does all 5 platforms and it’s just pure HTML, CSS, and JS. It’s announcing a stable release on the 15th. https://github.com/socketsupply/socket

You should probably disclose that you're the primary developer.

The name seems like a terrible idea, as it's so generic and unsearchable. It will be hard to find help with things, even if it becomes more widely used. The peer-to-peer stuff seems interesting, but the documentation is incomplete. Elsewhere the documentation says "It’s built from scratch, 1000 lines of code", but it's way more than 1000 lines (and it would have to be).

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#67

Post by SomeoneOnTheWeb »

yazzku wrote: post #13

What exactly makes the average Electron program so goddamn awful? Does the Javascript language inherently result in a bloat runtime? Are the runtimes accidentally bloat? Is it all the browser stuff and not the JS runtime per se? Or maybe just bad programming on the dev side?

Mainly the fact you have to run an entire browser (= more memory usage, slower startup time) and that it runs on HTML + JS, which is very slow compared to fully-compiled languages like C, C++ or Rust.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#68

Post by PriceDev »

I love HN because it opens up a dichotomy of views.

Optimistic: It is cheaper, as in time and cost, way to build products that users can enjoy and newer developers that only know web technologies can tip toe into platform apps.

Pessimistic: It’s not optimal and eats resources.

Me: I use it to build internal tools and don’t work on a potato so it can have all the resources it wants with my overkill machine.

Guess I’m somewhere in the middle lol.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#69

Post by CJefferson »

zhs wrote: post #2

Honest question, when solutions like https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri exist out there that promise smaller build sizes and similar developer experiences, are folks still using Electron to build new apps?

I tried using Tauri (about 6 months ago, so things maybe have improved), and found lots of inconsistencies and issues between platforms. It did work well on my "dev platform", but then things often misbehaved on other platforms.

I'm not sure many people are refusing electron apps due to the size, but they would definitely reject a buggy app that didn't work on their platform.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#70

Post by pantulis »

shp0ngle wrote: post #37
matt_holden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Figma, Linear, Notion, Slack, Superhuman, Pitch, Loom. All Electron. I’ve never understood the hate Electron gets on HN, when it powers so many great products that users love.

Slack took great pains to make the client not be a memory and CPU hog. Still better than Teams though. (Which is also in Electron.)

You can also see the pains the Evernote team took from the initial Electron-based 10 release until it became usable again. But you could also feel the product moving again after stagnation on a gazillion native clients. It was the right albeit mostly final engineering decision they took.
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