4 ms·
Electron is acceptable for seeding the development of a new idea, product, and/or platform. However, as the team and product grow up, it becomes less acceptabl
by mikhailt 9y ago
Electron is acceptable for seeding the development of a new idea, product, and/or platform.
However, as the team and product grow up, it becomes less acceptable as users expect more performance by going more native and deeper integration with the OSes.
Sorry but Electron is not the future for me. I dislike the memory consumption it eats up. There is nothing acceptable about a simple chat app eating up 1GB of memory when the identical IRC client I had was using 100KB and has more features and the same client was built back a long time ago.
As for others talking about how there's plenty of disk storage and memory, that's lazy. We're losing a generation of native coders to people who only know about Javascript and never taking the step to learn more about how bare metal works, effectively losing all the knowledge of optimizations, iterations and programming skills we've learnt in the past three decades.
I can assure you, you can stick with Electron apps only for your business but the moment I find a native version of the same apps, I'm done with your business too. Slack, VS Code/Atom, etc, none of them are on my recommendations list and they will never be until they either go native or there's a native competitor. Sublime Text destroys VS Code/Atom completely and yet, the version they've built 5+ years ago is still better than Code/Atom today in pure performance despite all of improvements Atom has done.
- kayoone 9y agoThat is the right opinion and programmers should think like this, but i also believe that this kind of thing is hard to stop when it makes it easier for devs to churn out software with existing skills and most non-technical users do not really care anyway. I guess it is a reality we have to accept and wait for web-tech based desktop app development solutions to mature. Maybe react-native is the way ?
- mikhailt 9y agoTechnology moves in cycles. We went through this back in 90s and 2000s with Flash, Dreamweaver, ActiveX, Ruby, PHP, and etc. I suspect we'll see us going from Electron > React-Native or identical and then realizing the benefits of native stuff and back to native code once MS/Apple/other OS try to replicate the ease development process with their languages like Swift, C#, Go, and etc.
- longsangstan 9y ago"users expect more performance by going more native and deeper integration with the OSes" "the memory consumption it eats up" Most users are not programmers. I doubt they can tell whether slack/spotify are native apps or not.
- ionised 9y agoNo, but they can tell when their cheap laptops start to slow to a crawl because the memory usage of three or four apps is obscene for the features they offer.