3 ms·
> I guess it is either Electron [...] The really crazy thing is that the group that eventually birthed Rust had an acceptably performant Electron alternative e
by cxr 6y ago
> I guess it is either Electron [...]
The really crazy thing is that the group that eventually birthed Rust had an acceptably performant Electron alternative even before Electron existed—and it supported both HTML and native-ish looking widgets. But they completely underinvested in it and eventually killed it—insisting that they knew better and that no one really needed or wanted it. In the meantime, Electron came along and is now so ridiculously pervasive that it's regularly brought up in conversation—even where its of very little relevance—just as a consequence of people looking to complain about how popular it is. The only thing we hear from the former group who strangled their baby, though, is how dire the outlook is for them and their influence on the future of computing.
- sickcodebruh 6y agoI’ve never heard about this Electron precursor. What was it called? Could you link to anything about it?
- jcranmer 6y agoI'm assuming the reference is to XULRunner [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
- nsm 6y agoGecko, which is the rendering engine used by Firefox, has existed for longer than Blink/Webkit (powering Electron). It also supported a UI toolkit (described in XML and a wrapper on Gtk etc.) called XUL [1]. I think OP is talking about this. Mozilla never tried to make it easy to use Gecko (plus the Spidermonkey JS engine) as a re-usable library outside Firefox, making something like Electron really difficult to do. On the other hand, Blink is a lot easier to integrate, which is why Electron exists (as a thin wrapper over Blink+V8). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL