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im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os

im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os companies and politics in the first place. most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as fuck.

babuskov 8y ago
I'm curious. If you have 20 electron apps running, does that mean you would have 20 copies of the completely same thing wasting your disk space and RAM? How would that work if all the application developers decided that native sucks and all should use Electron?
- Zekio 8y ago
  20 electron apps would be 20 copies of mostly the same browser
- pavlov 8y ago
  Yes, that's essentially what happens. And it's a huge waste if you have 20 Electron apps running. Each ships with its own copy of Chromium which is as large as an operating system. I created a proof-of-concept called Electrino that uses the platform native libraries to cut down on app size: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-with-electrino-c7ffdf1d6297 https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w... Unfortunately I haven't had the time to work on Electrino due to family, etc. — I wish I did because the need is clearly there.
  - ChristianBundy 8y ago
    Hey, I saw the post that got the ball rolling on Electrino and I've been meaning to reach out to you. Do you have any tips on where to start on porting Electrino to Linux? Electron-like "web" apps (that follow W3C standards) seem to be the future, and I'd love to help out however I can.
    - pavlov 8y ago
      Great! I use desktop Linux regularly and I have some ideas where the Linux port could start off. Would you drop me an email at pauli@lacquer.fi and let’s talk?
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open. I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge), but there should at least be away for Electron apps to share Chromium/Node runtimes between them.
    - satysin 8y ago
      Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve? Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc. Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :) Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?
      - tambourine_man 8y ago
        All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then. But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.
        davidjnelson 8y ago
        There is BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.
  - tbrock 8y ago
    Why wouldn’t google just ship a “libchrome” shared library so that they could share it?
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      They do, it's called Google Chrome.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Because google is more inclined to break their own APIs without concern of the integrations of others. Adobe AIR was an effort to create a common runtime for similar things... wouldn't mind seeing a few OS vendors coming together to support something similar, but on the flip side, I don't want to be stuck with Node 4.0's API in 2024.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  You also have 20 security nightmare apps running
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jcalabro 8y ago
> most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as... I'd hesitate to make this generalization. I need to use slack on a macbook for work and it crashes regularly. I tried out VS code and it also would crash on occasion. Worse than that, coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use. There are plenty of non-electron apps that are stable.
- epalmer 8y ago
  I'm on a mac and use slack an vscode. Neither has crashed on me. I'm wondering if there is something about your mac setup. I don't like that slack consumes some many resources. I love vscode so I don't care.
  - TheForumTroll 8y ago
    He is likely holding it wrong.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I've seen VS Code crash on Windows more than Mac... also, it often leaves anything you had running in the integrated terminal running in the background when it does crash. I haven't seen that specific behavior on mac though.
    - ebrenes 8y ago
      Most of the issues I've had with VS Code were actually due to extensions and not VS Code itself. Like for example, we started getting issues with CPU's getting pegged to 100% and it seems it was a couple of linters that were running causing that.
- freedomben 8y ago
  Not necessarily your main point, but this triggered me: > coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use This is quickly becoming one of those things I can't stand, especially when there are open source/free options out there. No, I don't want to use your homegrown application unless there really isn't a good option out there. And if that's the case, make it a good tool and release it OSS and try to get some traction behind it.
JetSpiegel 8y ago
It's better (and more efficient) to have a developer write (or waste, if you consider doing their job "wasting time") two interfaces than to waste the computer resources of a million people. Electron is just outsourcing cross platform development to the Chromium project.
- nradov 8y ago
  Unfortunately waste of users' computer resources is an externality and developers are more expensive than ever. Revealed preferences show that customers would rather buy more hardware resources than pay higher prices for efficient software (within reasonable limits).
  - alacombe 8y ago
    Then perhaps OS vendor should start thinking about unifying their UI SDK using web engines, because having to support the finicky toolkit of every OS is a waste of engineering time.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      That was Boot2Gecko aka FirefoxOS. I would not mind having that on a phone.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Generally I agree with you but for Electron we're talking about own-goals the developers inflict on themselves. No one outside of the HNosphere uses Electron apps.
    - 013 8y ago
      Plenty of people outside of HN use Slack, Discord, Atom, VS Code, Skype and Twitch.
      - radisb 8y ago
        Right now I have Discord, VS2017, a Postgres IDE and a bunch of Chrome tabs open. Task manager reports for memory usage (descending order): Discord: 1168,4MB, VS2017: 463MB, Chrome tabs: about 300MB each, PostgresTool: 152MB and the rest below 100MB. If I dont include all the chrome tabs, Discord uses more memory than all the other apps together, and some of them are "big" apps. So my 32GB RAM, high specs system, is able to run only up to ~ 30 instances of Discord, not counting even the OS. Wtf. It feels like malware.
gkya 8y ago
> im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" [...] Yeah, and that's a good thing. Furthermore, there are toolkits that don't, and they are still more efficient than Electron.
saagarjha 8y ago
> most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os companies and politics in the first place That's the point. Why download another framework when you have one on your computer already that's tailored to your platform?
u04f061 8y ago
All of the mess in apps belong to developers and it has very little or nothing to do with the underlying framework.

babuskov 8y ago

I'm curious. If you have 20 electron apps running, does that mean you would have 20 copies of the completely same thing wasting your disk space and RAM? How would that work if all the application developers decided that native sucks and all should use Electron?

Zekio 8y ago
20 electron apps would be 20 copies of mostly the same browser
pavlov 8y ago
Yes, that's essentially what happens. And it's a huge waste if you have 20 Electron apps running. Each ships with its own copy of Chromium which is as large as an operating system. I created a proof-of-concept called Electrino that uses the platform native libraries to cut down on app size: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-with-electrino-c7ffdf1d6297 https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w... Unfortunately I haven't had the time to work on Electrino due to family, etc. — I wish I did because the need is clearly there.
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  Hey, I saw the post that got the ball rolling on Electrino and I've been meaning to reach out to you. Do you have any tips on where to start on porting Electrino to Linux? Electron-like "web" apps (that follow W3C standards) seem to be the future, and I'd love to help out however I can.
  - pavlov 8y ago
    Great! I use desktop Linux regularly and I have some ideas where the Linux port could start off. Would you drop me an email at pauli@lacquer.fi and let’s talk?
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open. I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge), but there should at least be away for Electron apps to share Chromium/Node runtimes between them.
  - satysin 8y ago
    Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve? Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc. Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :) Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?
    - tambourine_man 8y ago
      All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then. But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.
      - davidjnelson 8y ago
        There is BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.
- tbrock 8y ago
  Why wouldn’t google just ship a “libchrome” shared library so that they could share it?
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    They do, it's called Google Chrome.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Because google is more inclined to break their own APIs without concern of the integrations of others. Adobe AIR was an effort to create a common runtime for similar things... wouldn't mind seeing a few OS vendors coming together to support something similar, but on the flip side, I don't want to be stuck with Node 4.0's API in 2024.
paulie_a 8y ago
You also have 20 security nightmare apps running

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jcalabro 8y ago

> most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as... I'd hesitate to make this generalization. I need to use slack on a macbook for work and it crashes regularly. I tried out VS code and it also would crash on occasion. Worse than that, coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use. There are plenty of non-electron apps that are stable.

epalmer 8y ago
I'm on a mac and use slack an vscode. Neither has crashed on me. I'm wondering if there is something about your mac setup. I don't like that slack consumes some many resources. I love vscode so I don't care.
- TheForumTroll 8y ago
  He is likely holding it wrong.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I've seen VS Code crash on Windows more than Mac... also, it often leaves anything you had running in the integrated terminal running in the background when it does crash. I haven't seen that specific behavior on mac though.
  - ebrenes 8y ago
    Most of the issues I've had with VS Code were actually due to extensions and not VS Code itself. Like for example, we started getting issues with CPU's getting pegged to 100% and it seems it was a couple of linters that were running causing that.
freedomben 8y ago
Not necessarily your main point, but this triggered me: > coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use This is quickly becoming one of those things I can't stand, especially when there are open source/free options out there. No, I don't want to use your homegrown application unless there really isn't a good option out there. And if that's the case, make it a good tool and release it OSS and try to get some traction behind it.

JetSpiegel 8y ago

It's better (and more efficient) to have a developer write (or waste, if you consider doing their job "wasting time") two interfaces than to waste the computer resources of a million people. Electron is just outsourcing cross platform development to the Chromium project.

nradov 8y ago
Unfortunately waste of users' computer resources is an externality and developers are more expensive than ever. Revealed preferences show that customers would rather buy more hardware resources than pay higher prices for efficient software (within reasonable limits).
- alacombe 8y ago
  Then perhaps OS vendor should start thinking about unifying their UI SDK using web engines, because having to support the finicky toolkit of every OS is a waste of engineering time.
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    That was Boot2Gecko aka FirefoxOS. I would not mind having that on a phone.
- gowld 8y ago
  Generally I agree with you but for Electron we're talking about own-goals the developers inflict on themselves. No one outside of the HNosphere uses Electron apps.
  - 013 8y ago
    Plenty of people outside of HN use Slack, Discord, Atom, VS Code, Skype and Twitch.
    - radisb 8y ago
      Right now I have Discord, VS2017, a Postgres IDE and a bunch of Chrome tabs open. Task manager reports for memory usage (descending order): Discord: 1168,4MB, VS2017: 463MB, Chrome tabs: about 300MB each, PostgresTool: 152MB and the rest below 100MB. If I dont include all the chrome tabs, Discord uses more memory than all the other apps together, and some of them are "big" apps. So my 32GB RAM, high specs system, is able to run only up to ~ 30 instances of Discord, not counting even the OS. Wtf. It feels like malware.

gkya 8y ago

> im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" [...] Yeah, and that's a good thing. Furthermore, there are toolkits that don't, and they are still more efficient than Electron.

saagarjha 8y ago

> most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os companies and politics in the first place That's the point. Why download another framework when you have one on your computer already that's tailored to your platform?

u04f061 8y ago

All of the mess in apps belong to developers and it has very little or nothing to do with the underlying framework.