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.
