Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#901

Post by grinich » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:16 AM UTC

nnain wrote: post #856

grinich wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to answer your question without hijacking the thread, but here goes: • It's got pretty much all the power features out there like Snoozing, Open Tracking, Send Later, Reminders, Enriched Contacts (i.e. Rapportive), Unified Inbox, Swipe Actions, Templates, etc. • It's open source and super easy to extend with JavaScript plugins. Developer have made dozens of themes and some cool plugins including PGP, Unsubscribe…

There are other comments in here comparing react-native to Electron. Do you know if you could build Nylas Mail at the same pace with react-native? Will the binary size/RAM usage drop significantly on react-native?

I haven't yet seen a substantial desktop app built with React Native and afaik neither FB nor GitHub is investing in React Native for desktop so generally this is hard to say. React Native is more of a framework whereas Electron is a runtime-- much different goals though both are super cool and I'm enthusiastic about the future of both!

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#902

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:17 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #875

jliptzin wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of users (like >99%) don't have a clue why their computer isn't performing up to par. They literally have no idea how any of it works. They might just assume that it's slow because they haven't deleted spam emails in a while (even while they use gmail) or didn't pay extra to get that 3.2Ghz machine instead of the 3Ghz. They certainly don't have any idea how to open up top stats and check what resour…

Yes, you'll often hear things like "I think I have a virus" or "I think I need a new computer". They're computer is fine, they're just running slow apps.

They need a new computer because they don't know how to make their old one work properly.

Getting a new computer will fix the problem though. :-)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#903

Post by mercer » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:20 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #283

_jal wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are talking past each other. Yes. Electron enables some new stuff. New stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise. Yes. Electron is a bucket of bloat that saddles what should be small, simple apps with enormous amounts of crap that has nothing to do with the app's functionality. Both of these can be (and are) true.

I think that's the real take-away here. There are upsides and downsides; I am pleased that it is easier to release desktop applications, but sad that the performance of them is so much worse . I wonder if one of the issues is that so many developers have now worked almost exclusively in the 'web' sphere, and aren't aware that native development maybe isn't as difficult as they think.

Perhaps someone with both native and web development can set me straight on this; I have very basic knowledge of the former.

I've done the latter for a long time now, and only now I'm trying to teach some people, I properly realize much knowledge is needed to do it right. It's not just arcane knowledge of the quirks of CSS/HTML/JS, but also tooling, build steps, knowledge of 'expected' web behavior, frameworks, libraries, etc. Much of this complexity is still there and often worse if you go for vanilla js and static html/css (in part because expectations of a web app are higher these days).

I started learning native iOS development and expected things to be much easier and more sensible, but instead I get the impression that it's not that different.

Xcode is apparently a piece of shit, and everyone tells me to avoid Xcode's interface builder. There's tons to learn about how a project is set up, as well as stuff that just isn't a concern for the web like packaging it up submitting to the app store (hours just figuring out how to correctly supply icons and get a certificate). More than once, as I'm following an online course, the lecturer will say something like 'this might seem like a logical approach, but DON'T DO THIS and do instead.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong. Perhaps when you put it all together it is significantly easier than doing the equivalent on a web platform. I'm just saying that I expected my initial foray into native, in particular Apple's 'walled garden', to be at least a little more like an actual garden rather than the chaotic, exceptions-for-every-rule (but kinda fun!) scrap-heap of the web I am familiar with.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#904

Post by tigershark » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #406

wvenable wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think there's a different flavor to this than with higher-level languages. This is adding a platform on top of another platform. The same objections existed years ago with Java when Swing was released. Java is a cross-platform high-level language but Swing is basically an entirely new platform. It's this platform on top of a platform that is objectionable from a performance, memory, storage, and inte…

We see the same thing with containers. Docker, flatpak, snap... It's just the right time for it. Languages have evolve to change the way we handle constraints like memory, speed, readability, expressivity etc. We are arriving at the pick of what languages can bring on the table. Sure we can improve things here and there, but the huge challenges now are integration, packaging, distribution, updates, communications, mu…

IT is a joke of engineering for non engineers. If a pull request doesn't follow some principles agreed a priori it doesn't get merged. If there are people that like to play the "IT cowboys" just hacking together stuff without any whatsoever process or unit test that certifies the behaviour of what they have written, jeopardising the entire team efforts, it is not a failure of software engineering, it's a failure of that specific team. And please bear in mind that I worked in such toxic environments, but I never thought for a moment that software engineering and software architecture are jokes. The joke was the team/organisation on which I was at the time.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#905

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:26 AM UTC

wott wrote: post #855

sametmax wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PyQT is alright. Kivy as well. Or anything in any other language. But none of them are close enough to the benefit of being able to use the tone of experience from the Web UI into the desktop. Eventually all GUI app toolkit ends up with a custom MVC framework, a client/server architecture, some kind of db for persistence, their own implementation of asynchronous event and communication models and a declarative layer…

> But none of them are close enough to the benefit of being able to use the tone of experience from the Web UI into the desktop. Web UI is a gazillion shades of shit, please don't dump that rubbish on the desktop. Thank you. Seriously, how can one take Web UIs, the most cumbersome, unreliable, inconsistent, unreactive UIs, as examples to be followed? That's beyond me.

Haha, "a gazillion shades of shit". So true.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#906

Post by blub » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

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…

There are situations where one has a choice between putting in the required work and becoming competent at a task, or waiting and hoping that the task will be simplified so that they can approach it with their current level of understanding. Unsurprisingly, the latter is not the path to personal growth.

A good example is the tech competence of the general population. Computer savvy or proudly dismissive? Now we have seen the technological improvements that allow people without tech skills to perform all sorts of tasks that they couldn't before.

The drawback is that the general population is at the mercy of the providers of these magic tools. If the provider decides to increase prices or move to a subscription model, they have to accept it. If the provider adds tracking & analytics and other privacy-invasive functionality they will be outraged, and then accept it. If the provider updates their app and puts features behind a paywall or completely redesigns the UI because their designers were getting bored, those people will have to grin and bear it.

e.g: Microsoft has decided to transform Windows into spyware: they can run code remotely, log keystrokes and upload them to their cloud, etc. Most people either don't have a clue or can't do anything about it, because they outsourced their software skills to Microsoft, which worked well enough until Microsoft decided that their interests are not aligned with those of their customers.

JS developers are another example of this - they are prisoners of JavaScript, although I wager most of them would say that they're happy to live in their golden cage rather than in the technological jungle that they're unfamiliar with. Condemned to go along with any decisions made by Google, Github, Apple or other companies that they have no influence on, because by not challenging themselves to learn, they gave up their freedom.

You mentioned that (some? most?) web developers don't even know what linking is and you support going on the same false path, dumbing down things until they are understandable to those that didn't take the time to educate themselves. This will only result in a generation of helpless individuals cobbling components together in a decent enough way to call it software.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#907

Post by baddox » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:55 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #664

baddox wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. Not really, unless you're using most of your RAM or you treat this as a fundamental principle. I've never checked my Slack RAM usage, and I'm sure it's higher than if they built a great native app, but it's also never had any performance problem with Slack or any other application (okay, except for Eclipse, but I stopped usin…

People are less likely to be spinning up vms but may have far less ram to start with and the more apps they use that are wasteful of power and ram the more likely this becomes an issue for them. It is truly strange to hear being resource constrained being described as a special case in computing.

Why is that strange for personal computer usage? How common do you think it is for users to experience a performance problem caused by low memory? I'm genuinely surprised that we could apparently have such opposing intuitions. My intuition is that it is exceedingly rare.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#908

Post by apexalpha » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 7:10 AM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #415

sametmax wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see the same thing with containers. Docker, flatpak, snap... It's just the right time for it. Languages have evolve to change the way we handle constraints like memory, speed, readability, expressivity etc. We are arriving at the pick of what languages can bring on the table. Sure we can improve things here and there, but the huge challenges now are integration, packaging, distribution, updates, communications, mu…

I agree. Containers should be unnecessary -- all that they could provide could be done at the process level with an operating system designed to isolate computing resources appropriately. But operating systems were not historically designed for that so another (somewhat ridiculous) layer is added on top.

actually all containers do is utilise the very design in an OS like LXC in Linux to form containers. Containers are not a platform on top of Linux, they are a wrapper around different isolation tools build into the kernel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#909

Post by skarap » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 7:24 AM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

I don't think developers have anything to do here. There are two kinds of companies: those which don't care for quality, security, performance, good/evil and those which are bankrupt, because they were constrained by those ideas while their competitors were not.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#910

Post by mlsarecmg » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 7:32 AM UTC

Sophistifunk wrote: post #838

mlsarecmg wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain? Redux isn't even close to observables in other systems. It's the immutable pattern that's a life changer if anything.

Redux and co are still the same pattern fundamentally, it's just that the implementing code is spread throughout your stack, instead of in an "Observable" implementation. That combined with an optimisation allowing identity and state equality to be conflated.

I don't know what you're saying, this is the complete opposite. Redux was made to centralize, because observables are literally spread throughout the stack. The entire logic is combined in composeable containers, later wrapped in a single store. Flux pattern is also completely different in how it works, there's almost no similarity whatsoever.

http://iweave.com/assets/blog/mvc_v_flux.png