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> Electron is a crutch. A crutch that people resort to because it's effectively impossible to write quick and dirty cross-platform desktop apps in anything else

> Electron is a crutch. A crutch that people resort to because it's effectively impossible to write quick and dirty cross-platform desktop apps in anything else, but, worse still, a _debilitating_ crutch that, unless you know what you are doing (and I daresay that is something people should be looking into) delivers overly bloated, resource-guzzling apps that wreck usability, battery life and (most visibly) RAM in _any_ OS. See, the other word for crutch is " force multiplier". And in one sense, the crutch is for the almost comically broken state of cross platform UI toolkits. GTK+ is inadequate and hard to use. KDE not only mandates language choices and tooling but also offers only marginal improvement. Every "good" and widely praised xplat GUI toolkit is either custom built for a browser or IN a browser. Apple's toolkit gets praise, but is hardly crossplatform. Microsoft is starting to ship an option, but it's not well cooked yet. It's one thing to note the problems with electron. It's another entirely too imply it has genuine competition. As far as I can tell, it does not.

rcarmo 9y ago
It does if you are willing to step out of the "let's do everything in HTML and JS" echo chamber - hence my mentioning there is no alternative for quick and dirty apps.
- pvg 9y ago
  Can you think of a Qt or, heaven help you, Xamarin-whatever based app that is really that much strikingly better than something like VS Code, as user interface and experience? OS X app, to narrow it down a little. I can't.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    Convenient you pick VS Code as your bar, given it's probably the one acceptable Electron app anyone can think of. Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen native apps that behave better than Slack or Spotify or Atom, just to name a couple of obvious examples.
    - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      I can't think of any acceptable Qt or Xamarin apps period, which is the real point of comparison here. The fact that VS Code is acceptable is truly surprising and represents a victory not only for Electron but the whole concept of cross-platform apps.
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        Then you're not thinking very hard. I'm too bored of this discussion to look at Xamarin, but for Qt, just looking at the Wikipedia page and cross-referencing with my experience with them, we have: VLC, Stellarium, VirtualBox, Telegram, Google Earth, LyX...
        Matthias247 9y ago
        From those two I use VLC and VirtualBox. And while they work fine, I don't think they are great showcases for good GUIs. E.g. the VLC guis scaling is quite bad on my 4k screen. The same applies also for the version QT creator which I have installed (but that's not a very recent one, maybe the current one is better). To be fair: I have seen various good QT apps, but most of them were not standard desktop apps. Instead they used fullscreen QML for highly custom user interfaces. That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.
        zzalpha 9y ago
        The scaling issue is more a problem of Windows than it is Qt, per se. And, good news, they're fixing it in the next major version! That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same. With the same memory footprint and CPU utilization? I highly doubt that...
        KirinDave 9y ago
        Sure, but the trade-off is a lot more developer time. "Twice as long" seems generous, and certainly Electron makes accessibility easier.
  - ivm 9y ago
    MonoDevelop aka Xamarin Studio aka Visual Studio for Mac It's a powerful and memory-efficient IDE written in C#/Mono.
  - dman 9y ago
    Sublime text?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  The definition of this as an "echo chamber" is itself a value judgment that denies fair debate. Is Qt better? Can it deliver better outcomes with more tooling flexibility? I think not. While someone else labors for something "slow and clean" to invert your analogy, Electron itself is improving. And many electron apps can be cleanly hosted on a browser environment, which further puts them out of reach. What's interesting to me is that for every successful cross-platform app I can name, it has a custom UI (and in some cases custom runtime) engine around it. That's great if you have the engineering capacity to swing it. I'm not sure many do. I wish we had a great, open source cross platform GUI toolkit that didn't mandate the use of C++. I don't think it's easy to suggest using C++ is reasonable for the vast majority of app devs. It's increasingly specialist even in its main domains. And I'm not in that "let's use JS" echo chamber. Look at my submissions to see where my affiliations lie. I just cannot deny those folks can pull off better looking, better specified, and more accessible products for a fraction of the total effort.overrides this. I refuse to handwave that away.

rcarmo 9y ago

It does if you are willing to step out of the "let's do everything in HTML and JS" echo chamber - hence my mentioning there is no alternative for quick and dirty apps.

pvg 9y ago
Can you think of a Qt or, heaven help you, Xamarin-whatever based app that is really that much strikingly better than something like VS Code, as user interface and experience? OS X app, to narrow it down a little. I can't.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Convenient you pick VS Code as your bar, given it's probably the one acceptable Electron app anyone can think of. Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen native apps that behave better than Slack or Spotify or Atom, just to name a couple of obvious examples.
  - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    I can't think of any acceptable Qt or Xamarin apps period, which is the real point of comparison here. The fact that VS Code is acceptable is truly surprising and represents a victory not only for Electron but the whole concept of cross-platform apps.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      Then you're not thinking very hard. I'm too bored of this discussion to look at Xamarin, but for Qt, just looking at the Wikipedia page and cross-referencing with my experience with them, we have: VLC, Stellarium, VirtualBox, Telegram, Google Earth, LyX...
      - Matthias247 9y ago
        From those two I use VLC and VirtualBox. And while they work fine, I don't think they are great showcases for good GUIs. E.g. the VLC guis scaling is quite bad on my 4k screen. The same applies also for the version QT creator which I have installed (but that's not a very recent one, maybe the current one is better). To be fair: I have seen various good QT apps, but most of them were not standard desktop apps. Instead they used fullscreen QML for highly custom user interfaces. That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.
        zzalpha 9y ago
        The scaling issue is more a problem of Windows than it is Qt, per se. And, good news, they're fixing it in the next major version! That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same. With the same memory footprint and CPU utilization? I highly doubt that...
        KirinDave 9y ago
        Sure, but the trade-off is a lot more developer time. "Twice as long" seems generous, and certainly Electron makes accessibility easier.
- ivm 9y ago
  MonoDevelop aka Xamarin Studio aka Visual Studio for Mac It's a powerful and memory-efficient IDE written in C#/Mono.
- dman 9y ago
  Sublime text?
KirinDave 9y ago
The definition of this as an "echo chamber" is itself a value judgment that denies fair debate. Is Qt better? Can it deliver better outcomes with more tooling flexibility? I think not. While someone else labors for something "slow and clean" to invert your analogy, Electron itself is improving. And many electron apps can be cleanly hosted on a browser environment, which further puts them out of reach. What's interesting to me is that for every successful cross-platform app I can name, it has a custom UI (and in some cases custom runtime) engine around it. That's great if you have the engineering capacity to swing it. I'm not sure many do. I wish we had a great, open source cross platform GUI toolkit that didn't mandate the use of C++. I don't think it's easy to suggest using C++ is reasonable for the vast majority of app devs. It's increasingly specialist even in its main domains. And I'm not in that "let's use JS" echo chamber. Look at my submissions to see where my affiliations lie. I just cannot deny those folks can pull off better looking, better specified, and more accessible products for a fraction of the total effort.overrides this. I refuse to handwave that away.