It's clear that highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. When pressed for reasons what exactly is so bad about Electron, they can rarely offer anything than vaguely mumbled "memory usage" or "b-but it's an entire browser" (both of which have not been true for years, for example Electron's memory usage has improved dramatically, but the meme stuck). The programming world is filled with people who read angry rants about why library X or Y sucks and you should hate it, then repeat whatever they remember because they think whining makes them seem smart, without critically examining whether it makes sense or not.
The reasons behind Electron: >It's fun to develop for >It uses as much resources as a single browser tab, if used in a sane way >It provides a low barrier to entry for contributors >It lets us easily build and deploy to all major desktop platforms (various Linux distros, MacOS, Windows) >It lets us use React for managing the GUI >There is no good alternative that would provide all these benefits (don't get me started on qt - try using their designer) >The users don't care about the technology you use to build your app
>It uses as much resources as a single browser tab, enough reason not to use it
Carter Phillips
here is my Any Forums "electron app". you don't even have to download or install it, it's magic
start chrome --app="
Jack Campbell
thats good and all, but when was the last time you actually needed something that couldn't be implemented directly in a browser? because besides raw socket supports, I never did.
David Jackson
to be fair esm is ass to use even in node.
Yet another reason to just write typescript and not deal with that bullshit
Connor Hernandez
the module importing is exactly the same in typescript as in the browser, only in electron it's a pain in the ass because they have some major design flaws deep in their system.
Jeremiah Reed
if anything electron should come as a service like JRE. it's complete bullshit that every app comes with its own chromium AND node instance but then why not just use the chrome command that i posted because literally everyone has a chromium based browser on their system. selecting the installed browser is trivial and can be done from a batch script. you can even add --user-data-dir to have access to the flle system. there is no use case for electron.
Leo Parker
So when will you fix bandcamp? It wont load any album
Jacob Evans
>>if anything electron should come as a service like JRE. it's complete bullshit that every app comes with its own chromium AND node instance but then why not just use the chrome command that i posted because literally everyone has a chromium based browser on their system. that's literally the static vs dynamic linking problem, except with the broken javascript module system on top history is doomed to repeat itself
Easton Howard
Slightly avoiding the topic, but I'm confused why nobody ever mentions Java when we're talking about solving the cross platform desktop problem. Yes, I know that if you have to target the web as well, then Electron solves that by allowing you to have a unilingual team. Otherwise though, if you just want a desktop application for all platforms, Java (with Swing or JavaFX) has solved this a long time ago.
Samuel Lopez
>It lets us use React for managing the GUI Love it. Electron is comfy as hell. Detractors are simply in denial that JavaScript is now the English of programming languages. Most will see the light eventually, others will continue to write their desktop apps in asm due to their incurable masochism. Such is the way of life.
>>There is no good alternative that would provide all these benefits (don't get me started on qt - try using their designer) It's been a while, but I don't remember Qt Designer being that bad, at least not with C++
Eli Gomez
People had forgotten about cross-platform desktop with java long before the recent exploit.
William Parker
JS became a better ecosystem with Web Assembly. The only advantage of Java is the bytecode VM which browser vendors should have tackled long time ago. A JS bytecode compiler should be built into the browser so we can get rid of the webpack toolchain clusterfuck too.
javas ui toolkit is unusable, especially now that html/css has become a norm and everyone moved to js frameworks.
Cameron Perry
Listen, I like handling the UI with web shit. It's pretty comfy once you get used to it and it solves the problem as well. I think we should keep in mind though that there are limitations. If you have a resource intensive application (heavy calculations or graphics work), it probably shouldn't be done by JS in Electron. I'm not saying you guys don't get that, just that many do. Really though, there are probably ways to separate those things out. Have the calculations performed by an API written in something else, etc. I would say it's still viable to make desktop GUIs with Java, even if it isn't the norm.
Bentley Torres
resource intensive applications aren't written in java either
Andrew Ortiz
electron rapes my CPU >t. 10 years old stinkpad owner
Sebastian Phillips
Maybe we have different ideas of "resource intensive". I mean, the most resource intensive aren't, sure, but Java can handle a lot being thrown at it. I don't want to sound like a Java fanboy, I don't even use it really. It does deserve some credit for being a fairly powerful all purpose language.
Levi Thomas
I used to hate electron until I realized that native UIs were so shit that it's pretty much your only option
Leo Allen
And you're also downplaying how efficient V8 is. Let me ask you something, what kind of performance difference do you expect between a java program and a javascript program? java being 50% faster? 2 times faster? 5? 10? Answer without looking it up.
John Gomez
you're right but we're talking shitty small apps in Electron like Slack and Discord, not full fledged desktop programs. It's something to be determined in the concept phase of the development.
Gavin Lopez
Sorry that you aren't white enough to appreciate good software. t. Qt master race
You're probably right. Much of the hate for the V8 engine is quite dated and missing a lot of the major advances. The reality is that it's probably fast enough for anything I would want to do in Java anyway and if I really need something faster, it likely isn't Java. I wonder though about desktop applications like image editors, or I don't know, a DAW for music editing. These kinds of things. The multi-threading abilities and general speed of something like Java might give it a significant enough edge that you notice.
