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I don't disagree, but I'm hopeful that Electron will get better. When you choose an open source platform with a diverse group of major companies using it, part

I don't disagree, but I'm hopeful that Electron will get better. When you choose an open source platform with a diverse group of major companies using it, part of what you are betting on is that the platform will a) survive for a reasonable amount of time and b) gradually improve. GitHub, Slack, Spotify, Microsoft, etc., are all using Electron. As their developers gain experience with the platform and as they experience problems with resource usage, I would expect to see the platform improve. Maybe I'm wrong.

bluejekyll 10y ago
On top of that, webassembly could see some improvements across the board.
- douche 10y ago
  The future, where we write in native languages, that are compiled to Javascript, run in a webbrowser VM, and power desktop applications. Jesus wept.
  - m_fayer 10y ago
    In 2014 I laughed. No longer laughing. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    It's not that they are native languages. They are languages with no overhead, GC is no longer necessary for example.
- sethc2 10y ago
  I agree. I think it also has the potential to help motivate developers to write native UI rather than use electron. Currently if for your market, your primary target platform is the web, but other platforms are still important, going electron might make sense because you really don't want to write your business logic natively for each platform. Web assembly allows us to use the same native libraries for all our business logic and data models, which besides being more performant, means we only need to be willing to write the UI natively on top of those libraries. We've actually taken (very) old desktop C++ code, and compiled it to asm.js and ran it in our web app, and then rendered its outputs with webGL onto a canvas and have had surprisingly successful results. This makes the prospect of WASM becoming standard across the board very exciting. Now let's hope we don't decide to replace our native desktop app, that uses this old C++ library, with an electron app of our web app, running the asm.js compiled library :).

bluejekyll 10y ago

On top of that, webassembly could see some improvements across the board.

douche 10y ago
The future, where we write in native languages, that are compiled to Javascript, run in a webbrowser VM, and power desktop applications. Jesus wept.
- m_fayer 10y ago
  In 2014 I laughed. No longer laughing. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  It's not that they are native languages. They are languages with no overhead, GC is no longer necessary for example.
sethc2 10y ago
I agree. I think it also has the potential to help motivate developers to write native UI rather than use electron. Currently if for your market, your primary target platform is the web, but other platforms are still important, going electron might make sense because you really don't want to write your business logic natively for each platform. Web assembly allows us to use the same native libraries for all our business logic and data models, which besides being more performant, means we only need to be willing to write the UI natively on top of those libraries. We've actually taken (very) old desktop C++ code, and compiled it to asm.js and ran it in our web app, and then rendered its outputs with webGL onto a canvas and have had surprisingly successful results. This makes the prospect of WASM becoming standard across the board very exciting. Now let's hope we don't decide to replace our native desktop app, that uses this old C++ library, with an electron app of our web app, running the asm.js compiled library :).