4 ms·

I'm sorry, I assumed web-render was the complete rendering engine behind Servo and was a Gecko equivalent. But my point still stands. A major convenience with E

by bgdam 8y ago

I'm sorry, I assumed web-render was the complete rendering engine behind Servo and was a Gecko equivalent. But my point still stands. A major convenience with Electron is that, if it runs on Chrome, it runs on Electron and pretty much everything runs on Chrome, so I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out work arounds for things not supported by the rendering engine. And the 'subset' of CSS alone would be reason enough to not pick web render. I do apologize if this appears as bashing your project, it really is not, and I'm sure going to spend a few weekends pushing it's limits, but I'm just super frustrated with the state of embeddable web rendering engines on the desktop, and my comments are mostly directed towards Servo and Web-render.

cztomsik 8y ago
the point of this project is not to "turn this webapp into a cross-platform gui app" (electron is really good at this and I think this is where we agree) it's more like: - let me make a cross-platform gui app really quickly (hot-reload) - without having to learn a ton of new APIs (so I can reuse most of my css + javascript + react knowledge & tools) - without overhead of web platform (DOM, lots of APIs, custom elements, shadow dom, paintlets, audio, video, geo, battery, ...) - while still being able to use any package from npm I completely understand why you are skeptic, but if people are interested in flutter, I think they should be interested in this too (if not more). No offense taken, I'm glad for your feedback. BTW: subset of css) this is rather about cascading (css-in-js vs. real css with global classes, etc.) html) major motivation here is "what if we could do webapps without dom?" like that we are using frameworks anyway (react/vue/...) and basically all applications are now built using components so what if we could send shapes directly to GPU? So it's not about being able to reuse everything, but it's about being as much familiar as possible, instead of reinventing everything (like flutter does)
- sebe 8y ago
  With regards Flutter, keen to see it come to the desktop, there are some experiments. https://github.com/Norbert515/flutter_ide https://github.com/Norbert515/flutter_ide
  - cztomsik 8y ago
    time will tell but I have really hard time understanding why they couldn't just use any already established platform (tools, libs, tutorials, books, common knowledge, stackoverflow, ...) +google is famous for killing its projects and technologies really often so I'll wait for a while before hopping on this train
    - sebe 8y ago
      The chrome guys who started the sky experiment, now flutter, used JavaScript for the first few iterations. I think they went with Dart because they were able to get the Dart GC customised for flutter. The big feature that the Flutter team got from Dart, that they didn't know they wanted, was stateful hot reload. Seems being able to build UIs with hot reload feature is a winner. Norbert's experiment, looking at building an editor in flutter, looks very cool. As he says it a lot of work building everything from scratch, but starting with a widget editor is a cool idea. The concept, in flutter, of every thing being a widget, even the app itself, is very powerful. I agree, time will tell, with people like Norbert, who are outside of google, I'm interested to see what they and Google do with flutter this year.
      - cztomsik 8y ago
        yeah, but stateful hot-reload is also possible with react and other frameworks so this is hardly a thing against javascript.

by bgdam 8y ago

cztomsik 8y ago

the point of this project is not to "turn this webapp into a cross-platform gui app" (electron is really good at this and I think this is where we agree) it's more like: - let me make a cross-platform gui app really quickly (hot-reload) - without having to learn a ton of new APIs (so I can reuse most of my css + javascript + react knowledge & tools) - without overhead of web platform (DOM, lots of APIs, custom elements, shadow dom, paintlets, audio, video, geo, battery, ...) - while still being able to use any package from npm I completely understand why you are skeptic, but if people are interested in flutter, I think they should be interested in this too (if not more). No offense taken, I'm glad for your feedback. BTW: subset of css) this is rather about cascading (css-in-js vs. real css with global classes, etc.) html) major motivation here is "what if we could do webapps without dom?" like that we are using frameworks anyway (react/vue/...) and basically all applications are now built using components so what if we could send shapes directly to GPU? So it's not about being able to reuse everything, but it's about being as much familiar as possible, instead of reinventing everything (like flutter does)

sebe 8y ago
With regards Flutter, keen to see it come to the desktop, there are some experiments. https://github.com/Norbert515/flutter_ide https://github.com/Norbert515/flutter_ide
- cztomsik 8y ago
  time will tell but I have really hard time understanding why they couldn't just use any already established platform (tools, libs, tutorials, books, common knowledge, stackoverflow, ...) +google is famous for killing its projects and technologies really often so I'll wait for a while before hopping on this train
  - sebe 8y ago
    The chrome guys who started the sky experiment, now flutter, used JavaScript for the first few iterations. I think they went with Dart because they were able to get the Dart GC customised for flutter. The big feature that the Flutter team got from Dart, that they didn't know they wanted, was stateful hot reload. Seems being able to build UIs with hot reload feature is a winner. Norbert's experiment, looking at building an editor in flutter, looks very cool. As he says it a lot of work building everything from scratch, but starting with a widget editor is a cool idea. The concept, in flutter, of every thing being a widget, even the app itself, is very powerful. I agree, time will tell, with people like Norbert, who are outside of google, I'm interested to see what they and Google do with flutter this year.
    - cztomsik 8y ago
      yeah, but stateful hot-reload is also possible with react and other frameworks so this is hardly a thing against javascript.