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OMG, another electron app that is meant to run as a daemon. It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a c

OMG, another electron app that is meant to run as a daemon. It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a chat. Yeah, I know that it's super hard to make native GUI these days, but please if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that. Examples of good ol' native desktop apps : twitter for OSX.

mcjiggerlog 10y ago
Wow, some of the comments in this thread are pretty harsh considering the developer has worked hard on providing what looks to me like a pretty cool free app. Nobody is forcing you to install it.
- juandazapata 10y ago
  So, people shouldn't be able to comment their point of view because the developer worked hard?
  - popey456963 10y ago
    I think people should be slightly less critical of design decisions enforced by a limited amount of time to work on a side-project that's free. Comments such as "why didn't you make everything from scratch" probably aren't going to contribute much to the conversation.
    - rimantas 10y ago
      Well, maybe we should choose our projects based on time we have for them, instead of using a hammer to drive in a screw?
      - Blahah 10y ago
        Or maybe the app works great and nobody cares what technology you wish had been used.
        rimantas 10y ago
        We have already established this is not the case.
        Blahah 10y ago
        No, we haven't. A bunch of people have used the app (including me) and said nice things about it. Then some other people have spouted vitriol about the fact that it's made with electron. Frankly all we've established is that a lot of people are bitter about electron and don't have the basic manners required to take part in a constructive technology community.
  - Veen 10y ago
    A considered statement in measured language about the negative consequences of using electron is one thing. This wasn't that: it's unnecessarily hostile — as if the OP was genuinely inconvenienced or put out by something that doesn't impact them in the least. Disagreeing with someone isn't the same as shitting on their hard work and good-faith effort to create something useful.
- popey456963 10y ago
  Completely agree. Electron is free, easy to use and doesn't take much effort. Although it isn't the most memory efficient thing in the world, it is great at making really small applications (like this one) which developers can easily make plugins for. Javascript is probably one of the most common languages, with Node.JS the most common server-side variant of it, allowing so very many people to contribute. Also, we live in age where we don't have 100MB systems. At the moment the program is using a whole 30MB, which constitutes about 0.4% of my 8GB system.
  - izacus 10y ago
    Choosing Electron kinda by definition means that you as a developer chose the easy way when developing the app and decided to compromise on user experience, performance and disk space to save a bit of time. It's an antithesis of "working hard".
    - randiantech 10y ago
      This app took at least many months of work of the developer, who, by the way, is giving it for free. No need to be harsh or disqualify him. IF you dont like it, move on.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - murukesh_s 10y ago
        There is nothing wrong in using Electron. What if Electron folks release a JRE sort of thing - a one time install that can support multiple Electron apps by sharing the underlying Chromium libraries. At that point we can bring down the app size to couple of mbs at max. And we can keep the same codebase without changing a single line of code. Regarding memory usage, it is indeed a memory hog and would require at least 100mb of memory per app. The only way we can see an improvement there is the Chromium guys doing some serious tuning to reduce the memory usage(Leakage perhaps?). Also not sure if we can even share the runtime between processes (Like windows dll), if that is possible, then we can hope to even bring the memory usage down. Instead of forcing developers to learn different programming language and APIs for each operating system, we should as a community think about improving ways to make Electron or something similar even better.
- drinchev 10y ago
  Hey, come on. I also had criticism in time for open source projects I worked on. It's not about the person who did it, it's about my opinion and why I wouldn't use it. Kudos for everyone doing open source.
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- plauncher 10y ago
  Don't worry about drinchev, it is very common in Bulgaria to point out flaws whenever someone else is doing something, instead of congratulating how awesome the work is. It is not personal, just cultural.
  - drinchev 10y ago
    Speechless here. Bravo!
    - plauncher 10y ago
      I know that most people don't know it, no reason to be speechless. But I've been living there for a good part of my life and observed that behaviour time and again. Someone does something awesome, then comes the first feedback, finds a flaw and makes the whole feedback just about that flaw. That's why the country is miserable and everyone is leaving. People don't enxourage eacht other but crizisize each other all day long. Besides that: Wonderful country and people!
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Behaviors contrary to Hacker News's culture are common to many national cultures and most sites on the internet. That does not make them appropriate here.
pymai 10y ago
sure native apps would be great, but this guy seems to be doing this in his free time. i doubt he has time to learn and make native apps on all three os's
- malka 10y ago
  Could not QT fill this space better than a whole electron stack ?
  - Blahah 10y ago
    QT used to fill this space, but developers flock to electron because it's a much nicer development experience.
    - Longhanks 10y ago
      Also, Qt Widgets are in maintenance mode. Not a good sign, imo.
    - josh-wrale 10y ago
      I can't blame people for trying to build things in what they find introduces the least friction to shipping. With traction, this app could be rewritten as native, supposing it's tenable as a first iteration. I use an Electron app on my Mac that's been open for days and is only using 100MB ram at the moment. RAM is cheaper than time for many folks.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    But QT isn't cool enough for the JS crowd
Blahah 10y ago
I feel completely the opposite way. > It's terrible. It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo. > if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.
- pikzen 10y ago
  >Who cares if it... I care, because it's a waste of resources, I care because I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery, I care because I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core, I care because I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations. You know, things Electron doesn't provide. I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today, and it's not half bad. That doesn't stop software from being absolute crap.
  - aeze 10y ago
    Good thing it's open source, so you can attempt to improve it if you'd like. :)
    - pikzen 10y ago
      rm -rf ~/cerebro-electron && mkdir ~/cerebro && touch main.cpp is a valid option, right?
      - spoiler 10y ago
        And now you have an empty file with all the functionality of the original app! Hooray!
sidcool 10y ago
I hoped a better comment were at top. This is disheartening for the developer. Instead of downright rudeness, constructive feedback would help.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  And it is disheartening for the users to have a dozen of electron apps competing for CPU Time or Memory slowing down your PC and draining your battery. Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible. If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
brudgers 10y ago
Maybe put some more RAM in your computer. It's pennies per megabyte these days.
wirddin 10y ago
I feel the same way. Whenever I see an app compatible with all three platforms, I check if it's built on electron. The less electron-based running apps, the better. The only electron app I (sometimes) use is Atom. I have switched to slack on browser, instead of the app.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mcjiggerlog 10y ago

Wow, some of the comments in this thread are pretty harsh considering the developer has worked hard on providing what looks to me like a pretty cool free app. Nobody is forcing you to install it.

juandazapata 10y ago
So, people shouldn't be able to comment their point of view because the developer worked hard?
- popey456963 10y ago
  I think people should be slightly less critical of design decisions enforced by a limited amount of time to work on a side-project that's free. Comments such as "why didn't you make everything from scratch" probably aren't going to contribute much to the conversation.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    Well, maybe we should choose our projects based on time we have for them, instead of using a hammer to drive in a screw?
    - Blahah 10y ago
      Or maybe the app works great and nobody cares what technology you wish had been used.
      - rimantas 10y ago
        We have already established this is not the case.
        Blahah 10y ago
        No, we haven't. A bunch of people have used the app (including me) and said nice things about it. Then some other people have spouted vitriol about the fact that it's made with electron. Frankly all we've established is that a lot of people are bitter about electron and don't have the basic manners required to take part in a constructive technology community.
- Veen 10y ago
  A considered statement in measured language about the negative consequences of using electron is one thing. This wasn't that: it's unnecessarily hostile — as if the OP was genuinely inconvenienced or put out by something that doesn't impact them in the least. Disagreeing with someone isn't the same as shitting on their hard work and good-faith effort to create something useful.
popey456963 10y ago
Completely agree. Electron is free, easy to use and doesn't take much effort. Although it isn't the most memory efficient thing in the world, it is great at making really small applications (like this one) which developers can easily make plugins for. Javascript is probably one of the most common languages, with Node.JS the most common server-side variant of it, allowing so very many people to contribute. Also, we live in age where we don't have 100MB systems. At the moment the program is using a whole 30MB, which constitutes about 0.4% of my 8GB system.
- izacus 10y ago
  Choosing Electron kinda by definition means that you as a developer chose the easy way when developing the app and decided to compromise on user experience, performance and disk space to save a bit of time. It's an antithesis of "working hard".
  - randiantech 10y ago
    This app took at least many months of work of the developer, who, by the way, is giving it for free. No need to be harsh or disqualify him. IF you dont like it, move on.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - murukesh_s 10y ago
      There is nothing wrong in using Electron. What if Electron folks release a JRE sort of thing - a one time install that can support multiple Electron apps by sharing the underlying Chromium libraries. At that point we can bring down the app size to couple of mbs at max. And we can keep the same codebase without changing a single line of code. Regarding memory usage, it is indeed a memory hog and would require at least 100mb of memory per app. The only way we can see an improvement there is the Chromium guys doing some serious tuning to reduce the memory usage(Leakage perhaps?). Also not sure if we can even share the runtime between processes (Like windows dll), if that is possible, then we can hope to even bring the memory usage down. Instead of forcing developers to learn different programming language and APIs for each operating system, we should as a community think about improving ways to make Electron or something similar even better.
drinchev 10y ago
Hey, come on. I also had criticism in time for open source projects I worked on. It's not about the person who did it, it's about my opinion and why I wouldn't use it. Kudos for everyone doing open source.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
plauncher 10y ago
Don't worry about drinchev, it is very common in Bulgaria to point out flaws whenever someone else is doing something, instead of congratulating how awesome the work is. It is not personal, just cultural.
- drinchev 10y ago
  Speechless here. Bravo!
  - plauncher 10y ago
    I know that most people don't know it, no reason to be speechless. But I've been living there for a good part of my life and observed that behaviour time and again. Someone does something awesome, then comes the first feedback, finds a flaw and makes the whole feedback just about that flaw. That's why the country is miserable and everyone is leaving. People don't enxourage eacht other but crizisize each other all day long. Besides that: Wonderful country and people!
- brudgers 10y ago
  Behaviors contrary to Hacker News's culture are common to many national cultures and most sites on the internet. That does not make them appropriate here.

pymai 10y ago

sure native apps would be great, but this guy seems to be doing this in his free time. i doubt he has time to learn and make native apps on all three os's

malka 10y ago
Could not QT fill this space better than a whole electron stack ?
- Blahah 10y ago
  QT used to fill this space, but developers flock to electron because it's a much nicer development experience.
  - Longhanks 10y ago
    Also, Qt Widgets are in maintenance mode. Not a good sign, imo.
  - josh-wrale 10y ago
    I can't blame people for trying to build things in what they find introduces the least friction to shipping. With traction, this app could be rewritten as native, supposing it's tenable as a first iteration. I use an Electron app on my Mac that's been open for days and is only using 100MB ram at the moment. RAM is cheaper than time for many folks.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  But QT isn't cool enough for the JS crowd

Blahah 10y ago

I feel completely the opposite way. > It's terrible. It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo. > if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.

pikzen 10y ago
>Who cares if it... I care, because it's a waste of resources, I care because I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery, I care because I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core, I care because I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations. You know, things Electron doesn't provide. I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today, and it's not half bad. That doesn't stop software from being absolute crap.
- aeze 10y ago
  Good thing it's open source, so you can attempt to improve it if you'd like. :)
  - pikzen 10y ago
    rm -rf ~/cerebro-electron && mkdir ~/cerebro && touch main.cpp is a valid option, right?
    - spoiler 10y ago
      And now you have an empty file with all the functionality of the original app! Hooray!

sidcool 10y ago

I hoped a better comment were at top. This is disheartening for the developer. Instead of downright rudeness, constructive feedback would help.

Aldo_MX 10y ago
And it is disheartening for the users to have a dozen of electron apps competing for CPU Time or Memory slowing down your PC and draining your battery. Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible. If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

brudgers 10y ago

Maybe put some more RAM in your computer. It's pennies per megabyte these days.

wirddin 10y ago

I feel the same way. Whenever I see an app compatible with all three platforms, I check if it's built on electron. The less electron-based running apps, the better. The only electron app I (sometimes) use is Atom. I have switched to slack on browser, instead of the app.

deleted 10y ago

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