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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#821

Post by mijoharas »

lima wrote: post #597
mijoharas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome apps would have solved one of the main problems if they were still a thing (does anyone know why chrome deprecated them?). (by reusing the chrome context, your memory usage wouldn't grow unnecessarily for each new slack/spotify/whatever you open).

They were deprecated because they aren't really necessary anymore now that you have things like service workers and NaCL. Never worked on mobile, too. Progressive Web Apps is where it's at.

So I've liked what I've heard about Progressive web apps, but I was wondering if there is a solution for desktop? can you create a native icon that opens a new window with a PWA?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#822

Post by [deleted] »

lima wrote: post #597
mijoharas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome apps would have solved one of the main problems if they were still a thing (does anyone know why chrome deprecated them?). (by reusing the chrome context, your memory usage wouldn't grow unnecessarily for each new slack/spotify/whatever you open).

They were deprecated because they aren't really necessary anymore now that you have things like service workers and NaCL. Never worked on mobile, too. Progressive Web Apps is where it's at.

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#823

Post by Neeek »

cyberpunk wrote: post #698
siddhant wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's not what the argument is. The argument is that electron apps are way more resource hungry than native ones.

So what? We have those resources. Does the weight of these just irritate you because of how wasteful it is (it irritates me for this reason alone) or does it actually have an impact on you? People said the same things about gtk or qt when we had motif right? Apps are going to keep getting bigger, our machines get bigger too. I'm not sure what he problem is. Edit: fat fingers

I think I'd like to do more with my machine as it's getting bigger and faster, not the same things from 10 years ago that now hog all of my excess. I have twice the cores, four times the RAM and an order of magnitude more disk space to play with than 2007, I don't think it's acceptable to just have applications take up an extra thread, twice the RAM and more GBs just because it's free; that hardware certainly wasn't free when I bought it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#824

Post by [deleted] »

wvenable wrote: post #783
devmunchies wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody in the last ~20 years has cared about writing Web apps before JS came along. There's basically zero money in it Zero money in web apps? You mean like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitch, Netflix, and YouTube? There's way more money is web apps than desktop apps. hands down. I'm not talking about mobile because this is a convo about electron.

Desktop apps like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop? I too can pick a few ridiculous outliers. Honestly I'm not sure if you're right or wrong but either way that argument isn't good.

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#825

Post by lmm »

cableshaft wrote: post #360
sametmax wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java. The world is asking for more and more software, and the resources to provide it are not following so people are taking shortcuts. Want something better ? Someone has to pay for it.

Yeah, but Python still doesn't seem to have a great cross-platform desktop GUI, as far as I can find. I'd prefer to code entirely in Python if I could, but I haven't liked a single GUI library I've tried for Python. Although to be fair I haven't really tried PyQT out still, but I don't like the idea of having to buy a commercial license for it.

> Python still doesn't seem to have a great cross-platform desktop GUI, as far as I can find.

PyQt is literally the best cross-platform desktop GUI going, in any language.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#826

Post by Neeek »

sametmax wrote: post #182

People complaining about electron are the same type than the ones that used to say : - why are people writing this stuff in C. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in Assembly. - why are people writing this stuff in Java. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in C. - why are people writing this stuff in Python. It's so slow and you don't have as much contro…

But the author says right there at the bottom, the problem isn't JS or web APIs, just that we don't need to be running a chrome underneath everything. They suggest React Native, I don't really know enough about it to judge, I've simply never been a fan of the resource toll electron apps have on my computers.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#827

Post by zensavona »

...and you know what Flash did for the web when it came out?

Allowed us to watch videos, drag and drop, consume all kinds of media and have interactive applications on the web which were at the time totally unachievable with JavaScript.

Is the internet's memory so short that you've forgotten how recently we have largely switched to HTML5 video?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#828

Post by ender89 »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

or, you know, a chrome app which works exactly like an electron app except they don't all require their own separate chrome instance. I mean an electron app is literally just a chrome app packaged with its own version of chrome.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#829

Post by ue_ »

overgard wrote: post #377
mentos wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and the author fails to mention the tradeoff between ram/diskspace and development time. >>all you web devs: Go learn C or Rust or something. Your program runs on a computer. I don't think that is a realistic request. When the cost of Slack's ram/diskspace usage starts affecting their profit then they can/will take steps to re-write the application in 'native' code. Until then its premature optimization?

C is not that hard! If you're a programmer, and you don't know C, you're not good at your craft. I realize that sounds incredibly harsh but it's true: your job is to make a computer do a task efficiently. If you can't even read the language that makes that possible, you don't know what you're doing.

>If you're a programmer, and you don't know C, you're not good at your craft.

Even as someone myself who knows (more or less) C, this is quite an elitist statement, and doesn't do justice to say, Lisp and people who use functional languages. The goal of programming isn't necessarily efficiency.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#830

Post by bluejekyll »

douche wrote: post #484
bluejekyll wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that, webassembly could see some improvements across the board.

The future, where we write in native languages, that are compiled to Javascript, run in a webbrowser VM, and power desktop applications. Jesus wept.

It's not that they are native languages. They are languages with no overhead, GC is no longer necessary for example.
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