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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 m

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.
    - popey456963 10y ago
      This would be pretty amazing, to have a shared base. Considering the amount of Electron apps that I've now installed I must have at least a couple of gigabytes dedicated to just hundreds of copies of Chromium.
- neom 10y ago
  What if the developer was 16 and this was the first thing they had ever made and they were super proud of being able to get something out the door? Read HN and then never made anything again. That happened to me with music when I was young, so discouraging and missed out on an awesome hobby in my 20s and am thankful I had the courage to pick it back up. The tone some folks take in this community often make me want to leave and never come back. I always hedge towards empathy when I don't know the developer personally.
  - pikzen 10y ago
    Oh come on. Half this thread is praise for the app. This one post is about how he picked a terrible technology. He'll live. Best case scenario, he'll even learn a valuable lesson, to not use Electron.
    - neom 10y ago
      It's about HOW one is critical, not THAT one is critical.
- MadafakinBATMAN 10y ago
  I guess we should all start making apps in assembly lang so that we can save some more disk space and performance on use machines.
- sidcool 10y ago
  What a smug reply. Developer community is quite harsh. Shipping is most of the times better than sitting on an armchair and delivering sermons.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    I'd go one step further and posit that the majority of people who shit on other people's work probably have never shipped anything themselves.
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  How ironic is it that if the OP, and those supporting them, had spent some time and not taken the easy route they could have rewritten their entire idea in a constructive way which would have not set off the shit storm occurring on this post...
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    They could've said it nicer, but i don't think there's a constructive way to say "either rewrite it without electron or start whittling down the electron code-base to remove all the stuff your app doesn't use".
    - 0xCMP 10y ago
      Not true, they could express that very idea and give their reason behind it. Plenty of people agree and use things from Suckless on Arch. Others simply prefer native experiences. The fact is that it's harder to explain that constructively, but that's kind of ironic coming from people saying the Developer took the easy way out.
      - Mithaldu 10y ago
        The only useful feedback here is "throw it away and start from scratch without chrome". This is however not "constructive feedback". And wrapping it in any layer of nice words won't change its core nature of not being constructive.

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.
  - popey456963 10y ago
    This would be pretty amazing, to have a shared base. Considering the amount of Electron apps that I've now installed I must have at least a couple of gigabytes dedicated to just hundreds of copies of Chromium.
neom 10y ago
What if the developer was 16 and this was the first thing they had ever made and they were super proud of being able to get something out the door? Read HN and then never made anything again. That happened to me with music when I was young, so discouraging and missed out on an awesome hobby in my 20s and am thankful I had the courage to pick it back up. The tone some folks take in this community often make me want to leave and never come back. I always hedge towards empathy when I don't know the developer personally.
- pikzen 10y ago
  Oh come on. Half this thread is praise for the app. This one post is about how he picked a terrible technology. He'll live. Best case scenario, he'll even learn a valuable lesson, to not use Electron.
  - neom 10y ago
    It's about HOW one is critical, not THAT one is critical.
MadafakinBATMAN 10y ago
I guess we should all start making apps in assembly lang so that we can save some more disk space and performance on use machines.
sidcool 10y ago
What a smug reply. Developer community is quite harsh. Shipping is most of the times better than sitting on an armchair and delivering sermons.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I'd go one step further and posit that the majority of people who shit on other people's work probably have never shipped anything themselves.
0xCMP 10y ago
How ironic is it that if the OP, and those supporting them, had spent some time and not taken the easy route they could have rewritten their entire idea in a constructive way which would have not set off the shit storm occurring on this post...
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  They could've said it nicer, but i don't think there's a constructive way to say "either rewrite it without electron or start whittling down the electron code-base to remove all the stuff your app doesn't use".
  - 0xCMP 10y ago
    Not true, they could express that very idea and give their reason behind it. Plenty of people agree and use things from Suckless on Arch. Others simply prefer native experiences. The fact is that it's harder to explain that constructively, but that's kind of ironic coming from people saying the Developer took the easy way out.
    - Mithaldu 10y ago
      The only useful feedback here is "throw it away and start from scratch without chrome". This is however not "constructive feedback". And wrapping it in any layer of nice words won't change its core nature of not being constructive.