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So what's your answer to Visual Studio Code then? I see Electron as opening up desktop development to developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to

So what's your answer to Visual Studio Code then? I see Electron as opening up desktop development to developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to do it. Should we gatekeep just because developers don't have the resources to do a proper native app?

Jtsummers 9y ago
How does Electron open up desktop development to developers? If they were already developers, how were they unable to use any of the many free (or inexpensive) development environments out there? For macOS, XCode has been free for as long as I've been using Macs (2006). For Linux, it's essentially all free. For Windows, yeah, it used to be expensive but setting aside full-fledged Visual Studio, there were lots of options that were either free or cheap. Just because we have a huge influx of developers who only know or want to use JavaScript doesn't mean my laptop battery, memory, and CPU need to cry every time I open up a note taking app.
j45 9y ago
What about desktop developers who know better to spend months developing something that can be built in weeks to solve a problem, and then determine if further action is needed? Its understandable if native developers will lean towards advocating for native apps, and non-native app developers don't. There's lots of folks however, who can comfortably do both and may believe value is just not in performance up front, but solving problems that add and create value.
rcarmo 9y ago
The answer might surprise you: I work for Microsoft and use Code daily. I like it and appreciate the relentless tweaking the team has been doing to wrestle down the Electron bloat (hence one of the parentheses above), but it's not immune to it -- on my desktop Mac (a 7-year-old mid-2010 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM) I routinely have to kill it and fire up TextMate or vim instead. On a 4GB Surface Pro 4 (which is closer to the average I mentioned) I can usually only run Edge, Code, Chrome and the native mail app before things start slowing down -- and by that I mean that every individual app is fast a few seconds after I switch to it, but swapping has begun in earnest and moving to and fro between docs, code and testing lags enough for me to start getting frustrated -- at which point I usually fire up vim inside the Linux subsystem. As an aside, I don't have Slack (or any other Electron app but Code) installed anywhere -- I just use the most lightweight browser on any platform to get at that kind of thing.
coldtea 9y ago
Visual Studio Code is not written by "developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to do it" but by highly expert developers at Microsoft, paid full time for that. Amateurs can and do write plugins for it of course, mainly because JS is easy and popular and with huge already existing npm libs to leverage. But take something like Sublime Text, coded by a single person, multiplatform, with tons of plugins too (though less, since it depends on Python), and with very fast performance. An ST that had a few more hands, and a few more exposed UI controls for plugins would absolutely trump VSCode in all aspects -- especially if it embedded V8 for JS plugins to work there too (not Chrome/Blink/Electron: just the JS engine like it does with Python).
mixedCase 9y ago
> So what's your answer to Visual Studio Code then? Sublime Text, Kate, Notepad++ if you're looking for the same low learning curve or Vim/Emacs if you have experience or are willing to learn either. Two days ago I finally snapped when I was refactoring a codebase that required me to have 4 VS Code windows open. Together with my regular browser I was eating 12 GB of RAM and I had no VMs open as I often do. The system ran slow as dirt despite having an FX-8320 (not a new chip, but it's no slouch and it's still an 8-core), an SSD and 4 more GB of RAM to spare. That's just downright unacceptable. > I see Electron as opening up desktop development to developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to do it. Should we gatekeep just because developers don't have the resources to do a proper native app? Excuse my french, but come the fuck on. I was 11 years old when I grabbed a copy of Visual Basic 6 because "I wanted to be a 1337 haxxor" and was able to drag and drop buttons and text inputs into an empty dotted window, bang them together a bit, copy paste some code from forums and have them working to some extent with no programming knowledge. You're treating JavaScript programmers as if they're mentally deficient just because many of them are new to the industry and don't know tools that aren't fashionable. If they grabbed Qt Creator and QML docs they would be producing lightweight apps in no time.
- stouset 9y ago
  And yet… they don't. You could continue arguing against the mounting evidence that Qt apps simply don't perform as well in the marketplace as Electron apps seem to be doing, or you could accept that perhaps one of your assumptions is wrong. Having used a few Electron apps on macOS, I'll offer a (mostly poorly-informed) opinion: Electron is the first cross-platform toolkit I've seen that has resulted in apps that don't feel out-of-place like their other cross-platform brethren, the software version of the uncanny valley. Even VS Code, the first editor I've actually liked since the original TextMate, somehow doesn't feel out of place (despite being themed uniquely). There was a list posted earlier of popular cross-platform Qt apps, and most of them (VLC, Google Earth, VirtualBox) share a common theme: they're effectively a thin UI around mostly non-Qt content. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of VLC's use isn't double-clicking a video, watching it, and closing the window (perhaps with some scrubbing around the content). Most of a user's interaction with VirtualBox is with the operating system inside of it. And Google Earth (isn't that dead?) has little toolkit-based UI inside of it, with most of the space reserved for flying around the planet's surface. Don't you think it's telling that the most popular cross-platform Qt apps are the ones with the least amount of Qt UI? On the other hand, popular Electron apps like VS Code and Slack are almost entirely about interacting with the UI itself. In the brief window of time Electron has been out, it's resulted in more popular cross-platform apps of this vein than Qt has in the 25+ years of its existence. "Are I out of touch? No, it's the other developers who are wrong!"

Jtsummers 9y ago

How does Electron open up desktop development to developers? If they were already developers, how were they unable to use any of the many free (or inexpensive) development environments out there? For macOS, XCode has been free for as long as I've been using Macs (2006). For Linux, it's essentially all free. For Windows, yeah, it used to be expensive but setting aside full-fledged Visual Studio, there were lots of options that were either free or cheap. Just because we have a huge influx of developers who only know or want to use JavaScript doesn't mean my laptop battery, memory, and CPU need to cry every time I open up a note taking app.

j45 9y ago

What about desktop developers who know better to spend months developing something that can be built in weeks to solve a problem, and then determine if further action is needed? Its understandable if native developers will lean towards advocating for native apps, and non-native app developers don't. There's lots of folks however, who can comfortably do both and may believe value is just not in performance up front, but solving problems that add and create value.

rcarmo 9y ago

The answer might surprise you: I work for Microsoft and use Code daily. I like it and appreciate the relentless tweaking the team has been doing to wrestle down the Electron bloat (hence one of the parentheses above), but it's not immune to it -- on my desktop Mac (a 7-year-old mid-2010 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM) I routinely have to kill it and fire up TextMate or vim instead. On a 4GB Surface Pro 4 (which is closer to the average I mentioned) I can usually only run Edge, Code, Chrome and the native mail app before things start slowing down -- and by that I mean that every individual app is fast a few seconds after I switch to it, but swapping has begun in earnest and moving to and fro between docs, code and testing lags enough for me to start getting frustrated -- at which point I usually fire up vim inside the Linux subsystem. As an aside, I don't have Slack (or any other Electron app but Code) installed anywhere -- I just use the most lightweight browser on any platform to get at that kind of thing.

coldtea 9y ago

Visual Studio Code is not written by "developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to do it" but by highly expert developers at Microsoft, paid full time for that. Amateurs can and do write plugins for it of course, mainly because JS is easy and popular and with huge already existing npm libs to leverage. But take something like Sublime Text, coded by a single person, multiplatform, with tons of plugins too (though less, since it depends on Python), and with very fast performance. An ST that had a few more hands, and a few more exposed UI controls for plugins would absolutely trump VSCode in all aspects -- especially if it embedded V8 for JS plugins to work there too (not Chrome/Blink/Electron: just the JS engine like it does with Python).

mixedCase 9y ago

> So what's your answer to Visual Studio Code then? Sublime Text, Kate, Notepad++ if you're looking for the same low learning curve or Vim/Emacs if you have experience or are willing to learn either. Two days ago I finally snapped when I was refactoring a codebase that required me to have 4 VS Code windows open. Together with my regular browser I was eating 12 GB of RAM and I had no VMs open as I often do. The system ran slow as dirt despite having an FX-8320 (not a new chip, but it's no slouch and it's still an 8-core), an SSD and 4 more GB of RAM to spare. That's just downright unacceptable. > I see Electron as opening up desktop development to developers who previously wouldn't have the been able to do it. Should we gatekeep just because developers don't have the resources to do a proper native app? Excuse my french, but come the fuck on. I was 11 years old when I grabbed a copy of Visual Basic 6 because "I wanted to be a 1337 haxxor" and was able to drag and drop buttons and text inputs into an empty dotted window, bang them together a bit, copy paste some code from forums and have them working to some extent with no programming knowledge. You're treating JavaScript programmers as if they're mentally deficient just because many of them are new to the industry and don't know tools that aren't fashionable. If they grabbed Qt Creator and QML docs they would be producing lightweight apps in no time.

stouset 9y ago
And yet… they don't. You could continue arguing against the mounting evidence that Qt apps simply don't perform as well in the marketplace as Electron apps seem to be doing, or you could accept that perhaps one of your assumptions is wrong. Having used a few Electron apps on macOS, I'll offer a (mostly poorly-informed) opinion: Electron is the first cross-platform toolkit I've seen that has resulted in apps that don't feel out-of-place like their other cross-platform brethren, the software version of the uncanny valley. Even VS Code, the first editor I've actually liked since the original TextMate, somehow doesn't feel out of place (despite being themed uniquely). There was a list posted earlier of popular cross-platform Qt apps, and most of them (VLC, Google Earth, VirtualBox) share a common theme: they're effectively a thin UI around mostly non-Qt content. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of VLC's use isn't double-clicking a video, watching it, and closing the window (perhaps with some scrubbing around the content). Most of a user's interaction with VirtualBox is with the operating system inside of it. And Google Earth (isn't that dead?) has little toolkit-based UI inside of it, with most of the space reserved for flying around the planet's surface. Don't you think it's telling that the most popular cross-platform Qt apps are the ones with the least amount of Qt UI? On the other hand, popular Electron apps like VS Code and Slack are almost entirely about interacting with the UI itself. In the brief window of time Electron has been out, it's resulted in more popular cross-platform apps of this vein than Qt has in the 25+ years of its existence. "Are I out of touch? No, it's the other developers who are wrong!"