Live data from Hacker News

Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

electronjs.org

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#81
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honest question: where does all the RAM go? If a chrome tab eats about 200 MB ram, shouldn’t an electron app consume about the same? After all Electron is just an SPA with all the assets packaged with the browser engine. Like the zip’d web archives of yore

I just opened Chrome to a news website and got 400MB of usage on the "GPU Process", 150MB on the "tab" process, and 100MB on the "browser" process. In Electron the webpage doesn't have access to native APIs like the system tray, so that's done by exchanging messages with an extra process.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#82
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I add https://flet.dev Uses python & flutter. And https://wails.io Uses Go.

Is there any good comparison wrt to Wails and Tauri? Or is the only difference between the two is that the backend is different?

wails2 has room to improve and I think it will be done in wails3, also it does not have mobile support yet, both Tauri and Wails might add mobile support in the future, using webview underneath.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#83

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…

Flutter is unsuitable for anything that runs on battery and needs text input. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327

It's insane that this bug is still unfixed.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#84
post #32

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…

May I add https://flet.dev Uses python & flutter. And https://wails.io Uses Go.

just played with flet, don't know why it mentions flutter in its home page as I saw nowhere flutter|dart is involved.

a helloworld python single binary is 28MB with pyinstaller, c libraries are shared and it is not a static executable.

it uses gstreamer underneath? not sure what that means, do I need gstreamer preinstalled on the platforms?

this seems like yet another Python based GUI framework to me(e.g. a new Tkinter), or I'm missing something fundamental.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#85

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…

Let’s hope the regulators recent attention to Browser engine restrictions will allow Node.js and Electron to run on IOS and Android. Would be fantastic especially for smaller software development companies that cannot afford to fund 3 dev teams.

I'm not aware of any browser engine restrictions on Android / Google Play. If Electron isn't running on Android, it's probably because the Electron project has chosen not to do it.

But since there are restrictions on iOS, maybe it's less appealing to bother with Android? (You'd want to be able to say you support both mobile platforms, but you wouldn't be able to. And there wouldn't be a path toward doing that that's within your control.)

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#86
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VSCode has proved one could build hyperscale complex apps that perform well did it though? It might perform "good enough", but its still an order of magnitude worse than native solutions. the only reason to ever use Electron or similar is for rapid prototyping. once you have an MVP, you should immediately work towards a native solution. people seem to forget that part, out of laziness or ignorance.

> once you have an MVP, you should immediately work towards a native solution. All of the chat apps that worked towards a native solution have died. Most of the other apps too, but all of the chat apps. Going native, despite being satisfying for the user, carries a maximum cost in terms of internal organization (several departments in the company for each target OS), HR (developers that can’t be recycled in other dep…

Telegram, which is easily the best chat app by software quality, has native apps on all platforms (well, QT on desktop, but that’s close enough). iMessage is native as well, and widely used, though it has admittedly fewer target devices. Those are the two I use daily, so I definitely don’t live in your Electron world, and I’m happy for it.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#87
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll reply to your question with a question: once VSCode has proved one could build hyperscale complex apps that perform well, would you be fast to bet for less proven tech? I’ve had a great experience using VSCode on occasion (I’m a JetBrains guy), and loads of other people, including some great programmers, rave about it. I’ve similarly had a fairly solid experience with Spotify desktop across different platforms.…

> VSCode has proved one could build hyperscale complex apps that perform well did it though? It might perform "good enough", but its still an order of magnitude worse than native solutions. the only reason to ever use Electron or similar is for rapid prototyping. once you have an MVP, you should immediately work towards a native solution. people seem to forget that part, out of laziness or ignorance.

What are the 'native solutions'?

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think you realize how slow those are, how slow they make your entire machine (eating the RAM for no good reason) You're on a forum full of software developers, I think you can give us credit for knowing exactly how much resources the apps we use take up. Personally, I frequently run VSCode, Slack, Zoom, Chrome, and occasionally Loom at the same time on a machine with 8gb ram and it's fine. Until one of thes…

Fully agree on all points, I've never had a performance issue with Electron.

I have had Slack fill my home directory with logs once , long time ago. But that wasn't an electron problem.

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#89
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're lazy and you should feel bad! /s

Re: Electron Fiddle: Get started with Electron

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Electron, Node, and Bun are also pretty generic and unsearchable. As to the rest of your comment, the p2p component is less than 1000 lines of code. And, as I said it hasn't had an official release yet (due on the 15th).
Post reply on HN