9 ms·

> It is a huge productivity boost for programmers at the expense of making computers slow. It's a productivity boost for web developers, who don't have to lear

by beojan 9y ago

> It is a huge productivity boost for programmers at the expense of making computers slow. It's a productivity boost for web developers, who don't have to learn a new language, and for companies that can hire cheap web developers instead of more expensive desktop developers. It's not a productivity boost for someone who knows (or is willing to learn) .NET or Qt.

laurent123456 9y ago
Users benefit from it too since the alternative to Electron often is not .NET or Qt but no app at all, especially on Linux.
- beojan 9y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have no app at all (and use an alternative) than have an Electron app suck users away from the potential native alternative.
  - thiht 9y ago
    So don't use it and use the web version. A potential native app is of no interest to me compared to an actual full featured Electron app.
    - beojan 9y ago
      If the Electron app exists, there's a lot less incentive to write the native one.
      - mateuszf 9y ago
        If the Electron app exists, often the alternative is no app at all.
      - OberstKrueger 9y ago
        See Slack. If Slack were still some plucky startup, I can understand it using Electron. But it's been around for a while now, and a more performant native application doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon.
        Aelius 9y ago
        Luckily Slack has the IRC and XMPP bridges. can't imagine any other protocols with a wealth of highly performant clients to choose from. Unlucky for me, my admins refuse to enable the bridges and also won't grant me an API key for use with the weechat slack plugin. I hate Slack so much. Slow and miserable and unconfigurable and just crashes at least once a month.
        detaro 9y ago
        Sadly, Slack also happily breaks the protocols in their bridges, e.g. producing invalid IRC usernames. So even though our Slack has the bridge enabled, I can't login to it since it wants me to put a dot in my nick.
        laurent123456 9y ago
        Skype for a long time only had an outdated application on Linux. Now that MS converted it to Electron, it's available and regularly updated. The truth is, even for huge companies like Microsoft, the cost of doing a Linux-specific app is not worth it given the small user base, but with Electron they get this for free so they do it. This is even more true for resource-limited open source projects, as cross-platform gui-based ones are difficult to get right, but Electron makes that easier.
        karpodiem 9y ago
        Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to.
        9y ago
    - majewsky 9y ago
      In some alternate reality, reasonable resource usage is considered a feature. Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.
      - placebo 9y ago
        Resource usage in this reality will only become reasonable when there will be a noticeable penalty involved in unreasonable usage, but I guess it boils down to what you define as reasonable: If a noticeable penalty is measured by the end user then - sorry, enough users just don't care, which enables this technology to continue to gain popularity. If there was a law that companies need to pay a percentage of the energy their applications use then you'd quickly see everybody moving not only to native apps, but to the most efficient native apps. In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.
        pasabagi 9y ago
        I think a brief look at the wiki page for 'Anthropocene' tells us exactly what the invisible hand is up to.
- swiley 9y ago
  I would rather run something in wine or run nothing at all than have to run an electron app. It's that bad.
  - h1d 9y ago
    How bad is it to run Electron apps on Linux?
    - pizzapill 9y ago
      Slack uses ~ 2 GB of Ram and ~ 10% CPU when idle. I used it for a short while but now I'm just leaving a Slack tab open in my browser. Its exactly the same functionality-wise. Basically I'm fine with Electron apps but I have yet to find one that I need and can't be replaced by a browser tab.
      - danielbarla 9y ago
        Comments like this make me wonder what's going on exactly. Surely your browser tab should now be using ~2GB of Ram and ~10% CPU, since it's the browser, HTML and JS part of Electron that's causing all that? To be honest though, since my VS Code instance is sitting at ~500 MB (all processes together) and 0%, I'd wager it's not actually Electron itself that's at fault. It probably is incredibly inefficient compared to pure native code, and probably makes it easy to write inefficient code, but still, that's quite heavy usage you're referring to.
        pizzapill 9y ago
        My guess is that a lot of memory in the browser is shared. Another commentor in this thread wrote that VS Code is incredible efficient for a Electron app.
        danielbarla 9y ago
        That could certainly account for some of the memory usage. I'm still confused about why there would be a 10% cpu usage on one, and not on the browser version (especially if they are equivalent, or even share underlying code). VS Code certainly is efficient for an Electron app, and I'm sure it's really hard to achieve that level of efficiency. To be honest though, I use it side by side with Visual Studio itself, and on many metrics, it eats its big brother for breakfast (e.g. [1])... and that is a native app. One can argue that it's apples and oranges, and that the two are not equivalent, but we have an interesting counterpoint. While I'm sure performance is heavily weighted in favour of native, it seems like it's certainly surmountable. [1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?lang=en https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?...
- megaman22 9y ago
  If it's a .NET app on Linux, you just run Wine, and you're all set.
jampekka 9y ago
This is the weird elitist argument again. I've done my share of native UI development, and it's total pain compared to HTML/CSS/JS. The tools are crap, the compile cycles too long, the languages to restrictive, the APIs too ad-hoc, the layout engines too crappy, the technology support (eg. multimedia) lagging too many years etc etc. The native libraries had decades to fix this mess, yet they're still by and large the same as decades ago. Will not miss them.
alexbanks 9y ago
> It's not a productivity boost for someone who knows (or is willing to learn) .NET or Qt. You do not understand what a productivity boost is if you think learning a totally new language and framework is a better choice than using the tools already available. But also if your logic were correct, we'd all still be writing C.
JPKab 9y ago
.net or qt don't offer all of the beautiful ui experiences available for the web. The latest and greatest in ui tech is now on the web in the form of JS/React/css.
- beojan 9y ago
  Yes they do, with XAML and Qt Quick respectively. On the desktop, I'd rather have the normal menu + toolbars layout though.

by beojan 9y ago

laurent123456 9y ago

Users benefit from it too since the alternative to Electron often is not .NET or Qt but no app at all, especially on Linux.

beojan 9y ago
As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have no app at all (and use an alternative) than have an Electron app suck users away from the potential native alternative.
- thiht 9y ago
  So don't use it and use the web version. A potential native app is of no interest to me compared to an actual full featured Electron app.
  - beojan 9y ago
    If the Electron app exists, there's a lot less incentive to write the native one.
    - mateuszf 9y ago
      If the Electron app exists, often the alternative is no app at all.
    - OberstKrueger 9y ago
      See Slack. If Slack were still some plucky startup, I can understand it using Electron. But it's been around for a while now, and a more performant native application doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon.
      - Aelius 9y ago
        Luckily Slack has the IRC and XMPP bridges. can't imagine any other protocols with a wealth of highly performant clients to choose from. Unlucky for me, my admins refuse to enable the bridges and also won't grant me an API key for use with the weechat slack plugin. I hate Slack so much. Slow and miserable and unconfigurable and just crashes at least once a month.
        detaro 9y ago
        Sadly, Slack also happily breaks the protocols in their bridges, e.g. producing invalid IRC usernames. So even though our Slack has the bridge enabled, I can't login to it since it wants me to put a dot in my nick.
      - laurent123456 9y ago
        Skype for a long time only had an outdated application on Linux. Now that MS converted it to Electron, it's available and regularly updated. The truth is, even for huge companies like Microsoft, the cost of doing a Linux-specific app is not worth it given the small user base, but with Electron they get this for free so they do it. This is even more true for resource-limited open source projects, as cross-platform gui-based ones are difficult to get right, but Electron makes that easier.
        karpodiem 9y ago
        Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to.
        9y ago
  - majewsky 9y ago
    In some alternate reality, reasonable resource usage is considered a feature. Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.
    - placebo 9y ago
      Resource usage in this reality will only become reasonable when there will be a noticeable penalty involved in unreasonable usage, but I guess it boils down to what you define as reasonable: If a noticeable penalty is measured by the end user then - sorry, enough users just don't care, which enables this technology to continue to gain popularity. If there was a law that companies need to pay a percentage of the energy their applications use then you'd quickly see everybody moving not only to native apps, but to the most efficient native apps. In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.
      - pasabagi 9y ago
        I think a brief look at the wiki page for 'Anthropocene' tells us exactly what the invisible hand is up to.
swiley 9y ago
I would rather run something in wine or run nothing at all than have to run an electron app. It's that bad.
- h1d 9y ago
  How bad is it to run Electron apps on Linux?
  - pizzapill 9y ago
    Slack uses ~ 2 GB of Ram and ~ 10% CPU when idle. I used it for a short while but now I'm just leaving a Slack tab open in my browser. Its exactly the same functionality-wise. Basically I'm fine with Electron apps but I have yet to find one that I need and can't be replaced by a browser tab.
    - danielbarla 9y ago
      Comments like this make me wonder what's going on exactly. Surely your browser tab should now be using ~2GB of Ram and ~10% CPU, since it's the browser, HTML and JS part of Electron that's causing all that? To be honest though, since my VS Code instance is sitting at ~500 MB (all processes together) and 0%, I'd wager it's not actually Electron itself that's at fault. It probably is incredibly inefficient compared to pure native code, and probably makes it easy to write inefficient code, but still, that's quite heavy usage you're referring to.
      - pizzapill 9y ago
        My guess is that a lot of memory in the browser is shared. Another commentor in this thread wrote that VS Code is incredible efficient for a Electron app.
        danielbarla 9y ago
        That could certainly account for some of the memory usage. I'm still confused about why there would be a 10% cpu usage on one, and not on the browser version (especially if they are equivalent, or even share underlying code). VS Code certainly is efficient for an Electron app, and I'm sure it's really hard to achieve that level of efficiency. To be honest though, I use it side by side with Visual Studio itself, and on many metrics, it eats its big brother for breakfast (e.g. [1])... and that is a native app. One can argue that it's apples and oranges, and that the two are not equivalent, but we have an interesting counterpoint. While I'm sure performance is heavily weighted in favour of native, it seems like it's certainly surmountable. [1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?lang=en https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?...
megaman22 9y ago
If it's a .NET app on Linux, you just run Wine, and you're all set.

jampekka 9y ago

This is the weird elitist argument again. I've done my share of native UI development, and it's total pain compared to HTML/CSS/JS. The tools are crap, the compile cycles too long, the languages to restrictive, the APIs too ad-hoc, the layout engines too crappy, the technology support (eg. multimedia) lagging too many years etc etc. The native libraries had decades to fix this mess, yet they're still by and large the same as decades ago. Will not miss them.

alexbanks 9y ago

> It's not a productivity boost for someone who knows (or is willing to learn) .NET or Qt. You do not understand what a productivity boost is if you think learning a totally new language and framework is a better choice than using the tools already available. But also if your logic were correct, we'd all still be writing C.

JPKab 9y ago

.net or qt don't offer all of the beautiful ui experiences available for the web. The latest and greatest in ui tech is now on the web in the form of JS/React/css.

beojan 9y ago
Yes they do, with XAML and Qt Quick respectively. On the desktop, I'd rather have the normal menu + toolbars layout though.