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Webviews can't access the V8 engine, have different implementations on every platform, and are worse in performance. As a business would you save 120MB in file

Webviews can't access the V8 engine, have different implementations on every platform, and are worse in performance. As a business would you save 120MB in filesize, or thousands of hours in development time? Electron isn't even unique in this. Blender is over 200MB now. Photoshop and Autodesk products have been big for a long time.

icegreentea2 5y ago
I'm still getting my head around electron development, but only the main process in electron is really supposed to access the V8 engine right (if you turn sandboxing on anyways). With sandboxing on, you're still doing IPC from your render context to some backend, where for webview would be whatever framework is using the webview right? Is the V8 performance benefit really that high compared to something like C# just calling system calls?
- janderland 5y ago
  I’d assume it’s more about the tooling and libraries for JS. If I want to build an HTML based UI, I have thousands of JavaScript libraries alongside thousands of developers who know how to use them. If I want to build HTML that calls into C# I’ll need to do a lot more work myself.
cma 5y ago
Blender includes art assets like HDR cubemaps.
- makapuf 5y ago
  And so so so much functionality. Video editor, modeler, several renderers, image editor, python text editor, sculpt software, importer, video audio mixer, compositor, graph editor, scripting engine, .. monkey model. So much functionality comparing it with irc clients is not fair.
doomrobo 5y ago
Would WASM solve the performance issue? One can imagine writing a webview GUI in a compiled language in order to get the speed and size benefits.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  No, that would be worse actually. Imagine a circumstance where you need to use a library to fetch some network data that you can't do in a browser. Now you have to import the whole data stream via text serialize/deseralize into the browsers sandbox. Wasm is also quite slower and bulkier because you'd have to compile your entire runtime into wasm, and then have it in the browser.
pjmlp 5y ago
I would ship a daemon/service that makes use of the user installed browser, if a Web interface must be.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  And you would then be back to debugging small intricate differences across browsers, which is what people ship Electron to avoid.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Since I don't want to be part of Chrome marketing force, that is a very good thing to do. Either go native or Web standards.
- laurent123456 5y ago
  That's nice technically, but awful in terms of usability.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Why?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Only if the developer doesn't know any better. It can replicate Electron UI/UX without the bloat or Chrome marketing.

icegreentea2 5y ago

I'm still getting my head around electron development, but only the main process in electron is really supposed to access the V8 engine right (if you turn sandboxing on anyways). With sandboxing on, you're still doing IPC from your render context to some backend, where for webview would be whatever framework is using the webview right? Is the V8 performance benefit really that high compared to something like C# just calling system calls?

janderland 5y ago
I’d assume it’s more about the tooling and libraries for JS. If I want to build an HTML based UI, I have thousands of JavaScript libraries alongside thousands of developers who know how to use them. If I want to build HTML that calls into C# I’ll need to do a lot more work myself.

cma 5y ago

Blender includes art assets like HDR cubemaps.

makapuf 5y ago
And so so so much functionality. Video editor, modeler, several renderers, image editor, python text editor, sculpt software, importer, video audio mixer, compositor, graph editor, scripting engine, .. monkey model. So much functionality comparing it with irc clients is not fair.

doomrobo 5y ago

Would WASM solve the performance issue? One can imagine writing a webview GUI in a compiled language in order to get the speed and size benefits.

devwastaken 5y ago
No, that would be worse actually. Imagine a circumstance where you need to use a library to fetch some network data that you can't do in a browser. Now you have to import the whole data stream via text serialize/deseralize into the browsers sandbox. Wasm is also quite slower and bulkier because you'd have to compile your entire runtime into wasm, and then have it in the browser.

pjmlp 5y ago

I would ship a daemon/service that makes use of the user installed browser, if a Web interface must be.

Klonoar 5y ago
And you would then be back to debugging small intricate differences across browsers, which is what people ship Electron to avoid.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Since I don't want to be part of Chrome marketing force, that is a very good thing to do. Either go native or Web standards.
laurent123456 5y ago
That's nice technically, but awful in terms of usability.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Why?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Only if the developer doesn't know any better. It can replicate Electron UI/UX without the bloat or Chrome marketing.