3 ms·

I'm both sad and confused about why there are so many negative comments about Electron, when I happily use Electron apps every day of my life and have no compla

I'm both sad and confused about why there are so many negative comments about Electron, when I happily use Electron apps every day of my life and have no complaints at all about them. In fact, I'd like to start building Electron apps of my own, it actually looks like a ton of fun! What is the experience I'm missing?

catdawg 6y ago
I think any technology where you can get something done quickly, and blurs the line between production and prototyping, gets a bad reputation because a lot of people misuse it. Essentially, I think you need to be able to have a strong engineering culture that takes the time to actually optimize things as the scale/scope changes. As a not quite accurate example, think JS vs C++, there's no way you can hammer a bunch of C++ to get something working without not shooting yourself in the foot multiple times, so you have, to a certain extent, to properly develop it from the start. Whereas with JS, you can probably get something working quickly and prove your point. And it's very easy for this shitty JS solution to end up in production because it just works. You can write very good JS code if you have the engineering culture for understanding it's importance, while with C++ it will be somewhat good from the start because it has to be. I think here is the same thing, for example what has been mentioned here, VSCode vs Slack.
deergomoo 6y ago
It is certainly possible to make high quality, well behaved software with Electron (VS Code is great), but it takes a hell of a lot of work, and seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Look at Teams for example. The Electron desktop app is a slow, buggy, resource sucking mess. A video call with one person reduces my laptop battery from 8 hours to 2, fans going at full tilt the entire time. It uses its own notification system that doesn't (or at least didn't) respect the system notification settings. Lots of small things you innately expect to work, like being able to right click a message to edit it, simply do nothing. Of course, take this with a grain of salt, because I'm generally of the opinion that the DOM is a mediocre target for applications, and that we all put up with it because it's attached to the world's greatest distribution mechanism. So to me, the fact that we'd want to bring all that awkwardness to the desktop and divorce it of its killer feature seems insane.
- vkoskiv 6y ago
  I love comments like this. Ideas that I've had for a long time articulated in a way I never could.
mekster 6y ago
Maybe they use computers from 10+ years ago, otherwise the complaint is weird.
croes 6y ago
Compare an electron app to a well written desktop app There is a difference in responsiveness. And installing a new browser instance for every app is a waste of disk space.

catdawg 6y ago

I think any technology where you can get something done quickly, and blurs the line between production and prototyping, gets a bad reputation because a lot of people misuse it. Essentially, I think you need to be able to have a strong engineering culture that takes the time to actually optimize things as the scale/scope changes. As a not quite accurate example, think JS vs C++, there's no way you can hammer a bunch of C++ to get something working without not shooting yourself in the foot multiple times, so you have, to a certain extent, to properly develop it from the start. Whereas with JS, you can probably get something working quickly and prove your point. And it's very easy for this shitty JS solution to end up in production because it just works. You can write very good JS code if you have the engineering culture for understanding it's importance, while with C++ it will be somewhat good from the start because it has to be. I think here is the same thing, for example what has been mentioned here, VSCode vs Slack.

deergomoo 6y ago

It is certainly possible to make high quality, well behaved software with Electron (VS Code is great), but it takes a hell of a lot of work, and seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Look at Teams for example. The Electron desktop app is a slow, buggy, resource sucking mess. A video call with one person reduces my laptop battery from 8 hours to 2, fans going at full tilt the entire time. It uses its own notification system that doesn't (or at least didn't) respect the system notification settings. Lots of small things you innately expect to work, like being able to right click a message to edit it, simply do nothing. Of course, take this with a grain of salt, because I'm generally of the opinion that the DOM is a mediocre target for applications, and that we all put up with it because it's attached to the world's greatest distribution mechanism. So to me, the fact that we'd want to bring all that awkwardness to the desktop and divorce it of its killer feature seems insane.

vkoskiv 6y ago
I love comments like this. Ideas that I've had for a long time articulated in a way I never could.

mekster 6y ago

Maybe they use computers from 10+ years ago, otherwise the complaint is weird.

croes 6y ago

Compare an electron app to a well written desktop app There is a difference in responsiveness. And installing a new browser instance for every app is a waste of disk space.