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In what do you prefer to write cross platform apps? Is there a more productive platform? The thing with the web, is that it's very easy for those familiar with

by Kamgunz 10y ago

In what do you prefer to write cross platform apps? Is there a more productive platform? The thing with the web, is that it's very easy for those familiar with it to try and shove into everywhere, I do it too. The amount of code that does things that are useful that one can just steal for his project is very high, with all the fiddles and bins and even more importantly, very accessible and, sometimes, when the gui code, it looks really good too, so people use Electron. BTW, they use Electron because they run the same editor in their Azure platform, as an online editor for files in servers, so knowing this, I'd say picking Electron is a reasonable choice.

camgunz 10y ago
If I need to throw together a GUI app I usually use Python and PySide. I've had co-workers use Qt Creator and they built way better and better looking apps than I did. There are tons of Qt examples and the docs are pretty good. Electron is almost never a reasonable choice. As a platform it's one of the slowest and most limited. You have a choice of a single, pretty bad language. It only works on a few platforms, and in practice it's limited to even fewer because of its poor efficiency. I'm sympathetic to devs that don't want to venture outside of JavaScript, but in the same way we shouldn't pretend that C is a great language to write web backends in, we shouldn't pretend JavaScript is a good choice for anything but the most basic of web scripting. Writing apps in JS, you're going to experience poor performance, high memory usage, a lack of portability, difficulty scaling to a large codebase, and problems with concurrency. You can usually tell when devs choose the wrong tool. If you write a DB in Java, you'll have problems with the GC impacting your latency (Cassandra). If you build a desktop app in JS you'll have weird problems with resource usage (Atom). If you build a web app in C it'll take 4 times as long, be unstable, and have weird restrictions. We should recognize that every tool has its use, and stop wildly spending resources making one tool passable at everything.

by Kamgunz 10y ago

camgunz 10y ago

If I need to throw together a GUI app I usually use Python and PySide. I've had co-workers use Qt Creator and they built way better and better looking apps than I did. There are tons of Qt examples and the docs are pretty good. Electron is almost never a reasonable choice. As a platform it's one of the slowest and most limited. You have a choice of a single, pretty bad language. It only works on a few platforms, and in practice it's limited to even fewer because of its poor efficiency. I'm sympathetic to devs that don't want to venture outside of JavaScript, but in the same way we shouldn't pretend that C is a great language to write web backends in, we shouldn't pretend JavaScript is a good choice for anything but the most basic of web scripting. Writing apps in JS, you're going to experience poor performance, high memory usage, a lack of portability, difficulty scaling to a large codebase, and problems with concurrency. You can usually tell when devs choose the wrong tool. If you write a DB in Java, you'll have problems with the GC impacting your latency (Cassandra). If you build a desktop app in JS you'll have weird problems with resource usage (Atom). If you build a web app in C it'll take 4 times as long, be unstable, and have weird restrictions. We should recognize that every tool has its use, and stop wildly spending resources making one tool passable at everything.