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Imagine reading the sentence: "Imagine spacex building a rocket with cheap plastic. Why us working in the disposable fork industry are still using this crap mat

Imagine reading the sentence: "Imagine spacex building a rocket with cheap plastic. Why us working in the disposable fork industry are still using this crap material!". And then you realize that this comment gathers a lot of support from the disposable forks engineering community. Time to deliver new features matters. Skill reusability matters. This is the economic reality that makes electron attractive to all the people that decide to use it to build software. The alternative to electron is not always a leaner different framework. It may also be not building software because you don't have the resources and skills needed.

wheno 7y ago
I think that is something that tends to be underestimated. The reason Electron is popular is because of the success rate in creating things. While projects that are trying to be better takes far longer or fails outright, making them less common. So it isn't necessarily that people are choosing so much as surviving.
kgraves 7y ago
That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want, look where this has gotten modern desktop development, you now have sluggish, slow, bloated applications vying for end user's resources. e.g. An end user using Discord and Slack has to download 2 Electron applications (~500MB of disk space) and this is for a chat app, Ripcord [0] can do both with less RAM resources and disk space. > The alternative to electron is not always a leaner different framework. You can have both, there are newer frameworks popping up such as Flutter, React Native and Reason Native. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
- manigandham 7y ago
  > "isn't the future that I or end users want" End users do want it as seen by the commercial success of Electron based products, including completely free products like VSCode even when Sublime and Visual Studio exist. Features and functionality almost always overrule performance. I'd rather wait a little longer to do something than not be able to do it at all.
- rkangel 7y ago
  > That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want It might not be the future you or I want, but it is the future that the majority of end users want. Market forces don't always work for getting users what they want (see privacy) but in this case the money is talking. Slack's desktop app is a classic example of being a memory hog, but Slack has been enormously successful.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    "want", for sufficiently well-chosen values of "want." ;-) Every time you hear someone complain about how their new PC is so slow to do $trivial_task, think again. Most users unfortunately don't know any better, nor have the inclination to teach themselves to.
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      This reminds me of the 'dir' test my friends and I used to gauge computer speed in the DOS era. Listing directories was so common its speed was easy to notice and compare to other machines. Modern OS's don't really have an equivalent to that. Probably because usage has become more fragmented.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    A regular user certainly isn't going to say "I want my Slack app to be built with a lean framework that uses less resources". But they very well might say "It's really frustrating that my new computer is so sluggish all the time", without knowing why.
    - mrec 7y ago
      There seems to be an opportunity here for platform vendors like Microsoft or Apple to be a bit more aggressive about "this application is what's slowing you down" notifications. (With the ability for the user to say "yes, I'm editing a 4-hour movie, don't warn me about this app again".) Don't Apple already do something similar for battery hogs? May be misremembering, but I'd have thought a similar principle applied. Half the challenge of course would be dissuading the vendor from excluding their own apps from these notifications.
- sbergot 7y ago
  I can't say about you, but your claim about what end users want is quite strong. End users want all the features (including performance) for free and then pick the currently available option that looks best suited for them. I didn't say that there are no other frameworks. The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still). If you prefer to install ripchord instead of discord and slack nothing prevents you for doing so. Let me write a few comments about it: - it made sense building it for the author because those two services already existed and already had enough users. Also the author has the skills needed to build it. - it won't be free - it is not feature complete compared to the reproduced services So it might attract users depending of the perceived gain from a faster software vs its price and the missing features. It also has to win over all the people that have already installed the slack & discord clients. If it gains significant market share there are 2 risks: intentional api breaking changes by slack & discord, and them redoing/optimizing their client to win back the lost users. Most probably: they don't care about the client part. They are selling a service and this new client might make some of their users happier. So we see that even though ripchord exists, it does not mean that electron hasn't helped in making two new services available. The ripchord author might be able to reproduce a client with a better tech, but that doesn't mean he has the skills to create a whole new offer (market research, sales, backend administration, etc). edit: format
  - d0100 7y ago
    > The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still). At this point what you have can't even be called skill, on?
    - sbergot 7y ago
      I am not sure what do you even mean by that. I am not talking about lazyness. I am talking about opportunity cost. Learning an application framework takes time. There is the language, the api, the architecture best practices, the design processes. You might want to learn about accessibility, responsiveness, cross platform issues, software packaging/distribution/update management. If you skim a tutorial and release an unmaintanable mess because you lacked experience with your tools users are not going to forgive you because thank god you did not use electron. You might have some time to learn all this. Or not. Maybe you are busy finding funds. Maybe you are pitching companies to get your first prospects.
- jwblackwell 7y ago
  Who really cares about 500mb on a laptop?
  - majewsky 7y ago
    There is a world beyond people who throw their notebook into the trash after 3 years. There are still plenty of users with 128 GB or even 64 GB. Now imagine Windows taking 30 GB out of these 64 before you even start installing any apps. Those people absolutely care about 500 MB.
    - hoffs 7y ago
      This is such bullshit, who the hell runs 64gbs of hdd. Budget laptops 6-8years ago already shipped with at least 300gb hdds.
      - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
        Plenty of laptops were released with small SSD's thou, probably still are.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        When the switch the SSD came the price per GB was high and machines/ssd actually went as low as 30GB.128/256GB ssd are still very very common.
      - rrix2 7y ago
        You can, today, walk in to a Best buy and buy a Windows 10 machine with 64 or 128gib mmc. You can buy them in most US department stores and people do buy them.
      - Scarbutt 7y ago
        The newest(2019) macbook air ships with a 128GB SSD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - hoffs 7y ago
      Also if you're running 64gb hdd there's no way that you're running Windows version that takes 30gb
- dotancohen 7y ago
  This is what I tell people who post "See what I made" when it's written in Electron. I don't hate Electron. I just won't trade _my_ limited CPU, memory, and bandwidth for _your_ inabilility to learn Qt. Your Qt using competitor will get my business.
  - sbergot 7y ago
    This is a valid opinion but a bit extreme as is. If the competitor lacks some features that would save you days vs a few minute of execution, you are trading your limited CPU, memory, and bandwith for your (unlimited?) own time.
  - iosonofuturista 7y ago
    And yet, QT picked JS for the language of its state of the art widget library. Not to mention a lot of QT apps bundle the entire thing as well, so I have in my PC several versions of qt5win.dll and friends, many exactly the same. Furthermore QT apps are not a guarantee of fast programs, and often the interfaces look horrible. I fail to see a huge difference in programming methods, even if the QT runtime clocks at about 50mb instead of 500mb.
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      But just for the GUI. The rest of your QT application could be written in highly tuned assembler, if you wanted to go that route…
  - pingec 7y ago
    Qt apps break all the way to being unusable on my windows system when plugging in an external display or RDPing to the machine. I use Kleopatra, Electrum, Qbittorrent, VLC, they all have scaling issues where the text and icons does not scale correctly with the buttons and other components.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Is your external display a much higher dpi than your built in screen and are we basically talking about desktop OS being shitty about handling mixed dpi?
- nullify88 7y ago
  As ripcord is only free during the beta period, I don't think you'll find many "end users" who would want to pay for it. The vast majority of Discord users being Gamers with big disks and plenty of RAM. Maybe some of the more technically inclined Slack users might consider switching, if they find the alternatives aren't missing too much functionality
- dyeje 7y ago
  The average end user does not care or even think about what the app they are using is made with.
  - smt88 7y ago
    Nor do they know which app is eating their resources. The hardware industry has trained them to think, "This machine is slow. It must be getting old. Time to get a new one!" In reality, they've probably just accumulated applications that run in the background and/or put less developer time into constraining resources.
- cpursley 7y ago
  https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/revery-ui/revery Cross-platform desktop apps with Reason
  - mixedCase 7y ago
    > NOTE: Revery is a work-in-progress and in active development! Recreating all widgets is a huge task and such a framework needs a lot of dev momentum behind it to be usable in production. I really like everything Revery promises but right now it's just not an option for anything beyond simple apps for personal use.
- cypressious 7y ago
  I want to thank you for making me aware of Ripcord. So far I'm very impressed with it.
  - jamesb93 7y ago
    Their guide for getting your discord token is broken afaik. I was able to find it by: 1. Go to discord 2. Control + Shift + I 3. Application Tab 4. Storge/Local Storage/discordapp.com 5. Refresh with Control + R 6. Token will appear, quickly copy it.
    - dancemethis1 7y ago
      Good job, now you're giving your personal information not to one, but to two different proprietary craps.
      - ghostpepper 7y ago
        Can you explain this comment? I don't understand what personal information is contained in a discord token, or who it is being given to in this example
- addicted 7y ago
  Disk space has increased by orders of magnitude. Downloading an additional 500MB Of stuff seems like a completely worthwhile trade off for me if it means that the application I’m using is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as opposed to the previous situation where uTorrent was a Windows only app, Transmission was a MAC only app, and then after many years they came over to the other side but with half baked functionality, and no where in there was a Linux option (or if it did arrive, it was even later). Compare that to Slack, or VS Code, which were available on Windows, Mac and Linux almost immediately, all while maintaining feature parity.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Average machines in 2006 were mostly desktops with hard drives of 80/120/160GB. Average machines in 2019 are mostly laptops with 500GB/1TB of storage in many cases much much faster ssds. This is less than one order of magnitude in the last 13 years. I personally would like to use that extra space for useful tools and multimedia not bloated chat apps. uTorrent is perhaps another bad choice. uTorrents first public beta release was in late 05 Qbittorrent was released in early 06. By the time about anyone was aware of uTorrent Qbittorrent was already a thing and as good. uTorrent went on to become first proprietary and ultimately ended up installing malware on users system and mining coin whereas Qbittorrent is still awesome. Slack with its famously crappy performance and battery destruction is probably another bad choice to make the case although I hear its improved lately. Maybe wait another year to use it as an example so people have time to forget how much it sucked. I would totally stay with comparing say visual studio code to visual studio and hope your audience doesn't remember Emacs and Jetbrains products are also cross platform without electron.
    - outside1234 7y ago
      Jetbrains was terribly slow, terribly memory hoggy — far worse than VSCode (which is insanely fast I will note). I think instead you should hope they do remember those.
      - mighty_bander 7y ago
- mighty_bander 7y ago
  I agree with you, but man oh man I have not had a good time with react native. We made a tiny little mobile application in it, and due to various libraries exploding with every minor release, I wound up spending hours upgrading and patching and screwing around whenever we needed to add some tiny feature, which inevitably required some kind of update. I don't know if I just got unlucky with my choice of packages, but it's soured me to the whole platform.
mises 7y ago
You're absolutely right, electron won't die until something better exists. Not something better in terms of performance or technical debt, something better in terms of quickly bring a cross-platform gui to market. This is the old problem: the middle manager can wave a sheet of paper around saying, "my team used an agile electron methodology to disrupt the plastic fork industry!" or whatever, and get rewarded. He cannot, however, explain that by using something else, he saved long-term technical debt, maintainability, etc. because those costs are not immediately visible. I'm kind of hopeful for flutter. God willing, it will solve our problems...
mighty_bander 7y ago
The difference is that Visual Studio 2010 was buggy as hell and is still a better option than... Honestly, every editor I've seen used on JS. It mostly stayed out of the way. It didn't hang when I moved the mouse, for God's sake. I think OP's point is that we're suffering needlessly, which is hard to refute when there were better options around nearly a decade ago. It's worth mentioning that this madness is mostly an issue in the JS community; everyone else is getting along just fine. And, as with npm, react, angular, electron, etc. etc. the JavaScript programmers act like these issues - already solved countless times elsewhere - are universal constants.

wheno 7y ago

I think that is something that tends to be underestimated. The reason Electron is popular is because of the success rate in creating things. While projects that are trying to be better takes far longer or fails outright, making them less common. So it isn't necessarily that people are choosing so much as surviving.

kgraves 7y ago

That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want, look where this has gotten modern desktop development, you now have sluggish, slow, bloated applications vying for end user's resources. e.g. An end user using Discord and Slack has to download 2 Electron applications (~500MB of disk space) and this is for a chat app, Ripcord [0] can do both with less RAM resources and disk space. > The alternative to electron is not always a leaner different framework. You can have both, there are newer frameworks popping up such as Flutter, React Native and Reason Native. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

manigandham 7y ago
> "isn't the future that I or end users want" End users do want it as seen by the commercial success of Electron based products, including completely free products like VSCode even when Sublime and Visual Studio exist. Features and functionality almost always overrule performance. I'd rather wait a little longer to do something than not be able to do it at all.
rkangel 7y ago
> That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want It might not be the future you or I want, but it is the future that the majority of end users want. Market forces don't always work for getting users what they want (see privacy) but in this case the money is talking. Slack's desktop app is a classic example of being a memory hog, but Slack has been enormously successful.
- userbinator 7y ago
  "want", for sufficiently well-chosen values of "want." ;-) Every time you hear someone complain about how their new PC is so slow to do $trivial_task, think again. Most users unfortunately don't know any better, nor have the inclination to teach themselves to.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    This reminds me of the 'dir' test my friends and I used to gauge computer speed in the DOS era. Listing directories was so common its speed was easy to notice and compare to other machines. Modern OS's don't really have an equivalent to that. Probably because usage has become more fragmented.
- kelnos 7y ago
  A regular user certainly isn't going to say "I want my Slack app to be built with a lean framework that uses less resources". But they very well might say "It's really frustrating that my new computer is so sluggish all the time", without knowing why.
  - mrec 7y ago
    There seems to be an opportunity here for platform vendors like Microsoft or Apple to be a bit more aggressive about "this application is what's slowing you down" notifications. (With the ability for the user to say "yes, I'm editing a 4-hour movie, don't warn me about this app again".) Don't Apple already do something similar for battery hogs? May be misremembering, but I'd have thought a similar principle applied. Half the challenge of course would be dissuading the vendor from excluding their own apps from these notifications.
sbergot 7y ago
I can't say about you, but your claim about what end users want is quite strong. End users want all the features (including performance) for free and then pick the currently available option that looks best suited for them. I didn't say that there are no other frameworks. The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still). If you prefer to install ripchord instead of discord and slack nothing prevents you for doing so. Let me write a few comments about it: - it made sense building it for the author because those two services already existed and already had enough users. Also the author has the skills needed to build it. - it won't be free - it is not feature complete compared to the reproduced services So it might attract users depending of the perceived gain from a faster software vs its price and the missing features. It also has to win over all the people that have already installed the slack & discord clients. If it gains significant market share there are 2 risks: intentional api breaking changes by slack & discord, and them redoing/optimizing their client to win back the lost users. Most probably: they don't care about the client part. They are selling a service and this new client might make some of their users happier. So we see that even though ripchord exists, it does not mean that electron hasn't helped in making two new services available. The ripchord author might be able to reproduce a client with a better tech, but that doesn't mean he has the skills to create a whole new offer (market research, sales, backend administration, etc). edit: format
- d0100 7y ago
  > The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still). At this point what you have can't even be called skill, on?
  - sbergot 7y ago
    I am not sure what do you even mean by that. I am not talking about lazyness. I am talking about opportunity cost. Learning an application framework takes time. There is the language, the api, the architecture best practices, the design processes. You might want to learn about accessibility, responsiveness, cross platform issues, software packaging/distribution/update management. If you skim a tutorial and release an unmaintanable mess because you lacked experience with your tools users are not going to forgive you because thank god you did not use electron. You might have some time to learn all this. Or not. Maybe you are busy finding funds. Maybe you are pitching companies to get your first prospects.
jwblackwell 7y ago
Who really cares about 500mb on a laptop?
- majewsky 7y ago
  There is a world beyond people who throw their notebook into the trash after 3 years. There are still plenty of users with 128 GB or even 64 GB. Now imagine Windows taking 30 GB out of these 64 before you even start installing any apps. Those people absolutely care about 500 MB.
  - hoffs 7y ago
    This is such bullshit, who the hell runs 64gbs of hdd. Budget laptops 6-8years ago already shipped with at least 300gb hdds.
    - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
      Plenty of laptops were released with small SSD's thou, probably still are.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      When the switch the SSD came the price per GB was high and machines/ssd actually went as low as 30GB.128/256GB ssd are still very very common.
    - rrix2 7y ago
      You can, today, walk in to a Best buy and buy a Windows 10 machine with 64 or 128gib mmc. You can buy them in most US department stores and people do buy them.
    - Scarbutt 7y ago
      The newest(2019) macbook air ships with a 128GB SSD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - hoffs 7y ago
    Also if you're running 64gb hdd there's no way that you're running Windows version that takes 30gb
dotancohen 7y ago
This is what I tell people who post "See what I made" when it's written in Electron. I don't hate Electron. I just won't trade _my_ limited CPU, memory, and bandwidth for _your_ inabilility to learn Qt. Your Qt using competitor will get my business.
- sbergot 7y ago
  This is a valid opinion but a bit extreme as is. If the competitor lacks some features that would save you days vs a few minute of execution, you are trading your limited CPU, memory, and bandwith for your (unlimited?) own time.
- iosonofuturista 7y ago
  And yet, QT picked JS for the language of its state of the art widget library. Not to mention a lot of QT apps bundle the entire thing as well, so I have in my PC several versions of qt5win.dll and friends, many exactly the same. Furthermore QT apps are not a guarantee of fast programs, and often the interfaces look horrible. I fail to see a huge difference in programming methods, even if the QT runtime clocks at about 50mb instead of 500mb.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    But just for the GUI. The rest of your QT application could be written in highly tuned assembler, if you wanted to go that route…
- pingec 7y ago
  Qt apps break all the way to being unusable on my windows system when plugging in an external display or RDPing to the machine. I use Kleopatra, Electrum, Qbittorrent, VLC, they all have scaling issues where the text and icons does not scale correctly with the buttons and other components.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Is your external display a much higher dpi than your built in screen and are we basically talking about desktop OS being shitty about handling mixed dpi?
nullify88 7y ago
As ripcord is only free during the beta period, I don't think you'll find many "end users" who would want to pay for it. The vast majority of Discord users being Gamers with big disks and plenty of RAM. Maybe some of the more technically inclined Slack users might consider switching, if they find the alternatives aren't missing too much functionality
dyeje 7y ago
The average end user does not care or even think about what the app they are using is made with.
- smt88 7y ago
  Nor do they know which app is eating their resources. The hardware industry has trained them to think, "This machine is slow. It must be getting old. Time to get a new one!" In reality, they've probably just accumulated applications that run in the background and/or put less developer time into constraining resources.
cpursley 7y ago
https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/revery-ui/revery Cross-platform desktop apps with Reason
- mixedCase 7y ago
  > NOTE: Revery is a work-in-progress and in active development! Recreating all widgets is a huge task and such a framework needs a lot of dev momentum behind it to be usable in production. I really like everything Revery promises but right now it's just not an option for anything beyond simple apps for personal use.
cypressious 7y ago
I want to thank you for making me aware of Ripcord. So far I'm very impressed with it.
- jamesb93 7y ago
  Their guide for getting your discord token is broken afaik. I was able to find it by: 1. Go to discord 2. Control + Shift + I 3. Application Tab 4. Storge/Local Storage/discordapp.com 5. Refresh with Control + R 6. Token will appear, quickly copy it.
  - dancemethis1 7y ago
    Good job, now you're giving your personal information not to one, but to two different proprietary craps.
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      Can you explain this comment? I don't understand what personal information is contained in a discord token, or who it is being given to in this example
addicted 7y ago
Disk space has increased by orders of magnitude. Downloading an additional 500MB Of stuff seems like a completely worthwhile trade off for me if it means that the application I’m using is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as opposed to the previous situation where uTorrent was a Windows only app, Transmission was a MAC only app, and then after many years they came over to the other side but with half baked functionality, and no where in there was a Linux option (or if it did arrive, it was even later). Compare that to Slack, or VS Code, which were available on Windows, Mac and Linux almost immediately, all while maintaining feature parity.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Average machines in 2006 were mostly desktops with hard drives of 80/120/160GB. Average machines in 2019 are mostly laptops with 500GB/1TB of storage in many cases much much faster ssds. This is less than one order of magnitude in the last 13 years. I personally would like to use that extra space for useful tools and multimedia not bloated chat apps. uTorrent is perhaps another bad choice. uTorrents first public beta release was in late 05 Qbittorrent was released in early 06. By the time about anyone was aware of uTorrent Qbittorrent was already a thing and as good. uTorrent went on to become first proprietary and ultimately ended up installing malware on users system and mining coin whereas Qbittorrent is still awesome. Slack with its famously crappy performance and battery destruction is probably another bad choice to make the case although I hear its improved lately. Maybe wait another year to use it as an example so people have time to forget how much it sucked. I would totally stay with comparing say visual studio code to visual studio and hope your audience doesn't remember Emacs and Jetbrains products are also cross platform without electron.
  - outside1234 7y ago
    Jetbrains was terribly slow, terribly memory hoggy — far worse than VSCode (which is insanely fast I will note). I think instead you should hope they do remember those.
    - mighty_bander 7y ago
mighty_bander 7y ago
I agree with you, but man oh man I have not had a good time with react native. We made a tiny little mobile application in it, and due to various libraries exploding with every minor release, I wound up spending hours upgrading and patching and screwing around whenever we needed to add some tiny feature, which inevitably required some kind of update. I don't know if I just got unlucky with my choice of packages, but it's soured me to the whole platform.

mises 7y ago

You're absolutely right, electron won't die until something better exists. Not something better in terms of performance or technical debt, something better in terms of quickly bring a cross-platform gui to market. This is the old problem: the middle manager can wave a sheet of paper around saying, "my team used an agile electron methodology to disrupt the plastic fork industry!" or whatever, and get rewarded. He cannot, however, explain that by using something else, he saved long-term technical debt, maintainability, etc. because those costs are not immediately visible. I'm kind of hopeful for flutter. God willing, it will solve our problems...

mighty_bander 7y ago

The difference is that Visual Studio 2010 was buggy as hell and is still a better option than... Honestly, every editor I've seen used on JS. It mostly stayed out of the way. It didn't hang when I moved the mouse, for God's sake. I think OP's point is that we're suffering needlessly, which is hard to refute when there were better options around nearly a decade ago. It's worth mentioning that this madness is mostly an issue in the JS community; everyone else is getting along just fine. And, as with npm, react, angular, electron, etc. etc. the JavaScript programmers act like these issues - already solved countless times elsewhere - are universal constants.