4 ms·

So what do we do about it? Even if Electron doesn't give feature parity across OSes, it still has some other huge wins. It allows you to use "webdev" talent to

by kortex 5y ago

So what do we do about it? Even if Electron doesn't give feature parity across OSes, it still has some other huge wins. It allows you to use "webdev" talent to build guis, which are (I presume) easier to hire. They can use their favorite frameworks. It seems like SPA-esque-apps have some agility in development over other native approaches. It makes updates, CI/CD, and testing easier. Even if not prioritizing cross-platform, Electron has some serious appeal. What are my alternatives? Qt? Gtk? Native libraries?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> What are my alternatives? Qt? Gtk? Native libraries? I don't know what the development side is like, but as a user I do find Qt apps to be fairly nice. I also think Java (Swing) apps are basically fine. Java was "bloated" back in the day, but not relative to what else is in use today.
- kortex 5y ago
  Hm, Jvm also gives access to Kotlin and Scala, I'll definitely have to look into it. Qt development can be excellent or nightmarish, sometimes both. I don't know enough to know why the disparity but I've been adjacent to teams that love qt and ones that loathe it. I'm guessing a big aspect is state management; qt predates the reactive revolution, and IIRC is prone (as is any gui) to callback hell.
  - ensiferum 5y ago
    Overall Qt is quite nice and works portably across platforms. You're right about callback hell but there's a fox for it. Personally I prefer to create a bunch of overloaded utility functions for different widgets and data types and in each utility function i use QSignalBlocker to make sure I'm not accidentally invoking any callbacks. I condiser any "raw" Qt "setXYZ" call to be a bug.
    - kortex 5y ago
      Huh, neat. What's a "fox" in this context? I tried searching "qt fox" and got some, ahem, less than salient results.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - krylon 5y ago
        Typo for "fix" would be my guess.
- danmur 5y ago
  Just as a fun test a while ago I made a small desktop app with scala and scalafx/javafx. It's not bad, gives you some of the nice things you get from js guis (reactive rather than loads of callbacks etc).
danmur 5y ago
It's a shame that cross-platform GUI toolkits seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat (as in, native toolkits like Qt or GTK). I wish it were not so. I can see why the electron route is so tempting, I just really hate them as a user. I wrote a bunch of GTK desktop apps with Python like 15 years ago and they were snappy and you'd never even know it was Python behind it, but I wouldn't do that now. Too hard to distribute, bindings a bit clunky, lots more cross-platform testing, it's hard to look at the relative levels of effort and not take the faster path.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  I’m not one with much experience, but I rewrote my Qt based code for a small python app into C++ and the results were amazingly better. I would bet GTK might be similar!
- api 5y ago
  Qt is pretty good, but honestly since React came out I can't code a GUI in any other way. Reactive is the way to do (application) GUIs, period, and anything else feels like clunky bug-prone spaghetti. I put application in parentheses because other paradigms may make sense for high performance rendering pipes like games. Honestly I don't think HTML5/CSS/JS is that bad as a pure presentation layer. It has warts as they all do, but it can be made to look decent and is fairly productive. The bloat is mostly the fault of Electron specifically. Tauri and Sciter are much leaner, in some cases leaner than Qt depending on the app.
- jschwartzi 5y ago
  A Qt install with all the bells and whistles is about 500 megabytes, so it’s very comparable in size to Electron. Qml is a lot easier to develop in than Node+browser though.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    Size on disk isn't, or shouldn't be a problem today. In an ecosystem where there are games that take up over 100 gigabytes of storage, few apps should be large enough to make a user double take. CPU and Memory usage on the other hand can be serious concerns and one where Electron apps have a serious problem compared to traditional approaches.
the__alchemist 5y ago
> What are my alternatives? Qt? Gtk? Native libraries? Yes. You are not a Javascript Programmer, or a Frontend Programmer; Choose the right tool for each job.

by kortex 5y ago

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> What are my alternatives? Qt? Gtk? Native libraries? I don't know what the development side is like, but as a user I do find Qt apps to be fairly nice. I also think Java (Swing) apps are basically fine. Java was "bloated" back in the day, but not relative to what else is in use today.

kortex 5y ago
Hm, Jvm also gives access to Kotlin and Scala, I'll definitely have to look into it. Qt development can be excellent or nightmarish, sometimes both. I don't know enough to know why the disparity but I've been adjacent to teams that love qt and ones that loathe it. I'm guessing a big aspect is state management; qt predates the reactive revolution, and IIRC is prone (as is any gui) to callback hell.
- ensiferum 5y ago
  Overall Qt is quite nice and works portably across platforms. You're right about callback hell but there's a fox for it. Personally I prefer to create a bunch of overloaded utility functions for different widgets and data types and in each utility function i use QSignalBlocker to make sure I'm not accidentally invoking any callbacks. I condiser any "raw" Qt "setXYZ" call to be a bug.
  - kortex 5y ago
    Huh, neat. What's a "fox" in this context? I tried searching "qt fox" and got some, ahem, less than salient results.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - krylon 5y ago
      Typo for "fix" would be my guess.
danmur 5y ago
Just as a fun test a while ago I made a small desktop app with scala and scalafx/javafx. It's not bad, gives you some of the nice things you get from js guis (reactive rather than loads of callbacks etc).

danmur 5y ago

It's a shame that cross-platform GUI toolkits seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat (as in, native toolkits like Qt or GTK). I wish it were not so. I can see why the electron route is so tempting, I just really hate them as a user. I wrote a bunch of GTK desktop apps with Python like 15 years ago and they were snappy and you'd never even know it was Python behind it, but I wouldn't do that now. Too hard to distribute, bindings a bit clunky, lots more cross-platform testing, it's hard to look at the relative levels of effort and not take the faster path.

beowulfey 5y ago
I’m not one with much experience, but I rewrote my Qt based code for a small python app into C++ and the results were amazingly better. I would bet GTK might be similar!
api 5y ago
Qt is pretty good, but honestly since React came out I can't code a GUI in any other way. Reactive is the way to do (application) GUIs, period, and anything else feels like clunky bug-prone spaghetti. I put application in parentheses because other paradigms may make sense for high performance rendering pipes like games. Honestly I don't think HTML5/CSS/JS is that bad as a pure presentation layer. It has warts as they all do, but it can be made to look decent and is fairly productive. The bloat is mostly the fault of Electron specifically. Tauri and Sciter are much leaner, in some cases leaner than Qt depending on the app.
jschwartzi 5y ago
A Qt install with all the bells and whistles is about 500 megabytes, so it’s very comparable in size to Electron. Qml is a lot easier to develop in than Node+browser though.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  Size on disk isn't, or shouldn't be a problem today. In an ecosystem where there are games that take up over 100 gigabytes of storage, few apps should be large enough to make a user double take. CPU and Memory usage on the other hand can be serious concerns and one where Electron apps have a serious problem compared to traditional approaches.

the__alchemist 5y ago

> What are my alternatives? Qt? Gtk? Native libraries? Yes. You are not a Javascript Programmer, or a Frontend Programmer; Choose the right tool for each job.