5 ms·

Also existence of Electron and other, similar technologies.

by xvilka 5y ago

vbezhenar 5y ago
Electron is pretty capable technology. SpaceX uses Electron in space. I recently reverse-engineered firmware of some small device with tiny screen and underpowered CPU. It used Electron for its GUI. I would say that issue is not Electron itself. Issue is other GUI frameworks which are so terrible that developers prefer Electron despite its objective issues. I spent good amount of time learning WinAPI, learning MFC, learning Delphi, learning Swing, learning JavaFX, learning a little bit of WinForms. I wrote few native Android apps and iOS apps. I'm not an expert, but I saw enough APIs. I'm mostly backend developer. I know JS, but only enough to be able to read the code and do some modifications. If I would need to write GUI, I'd write it with HTML/CSS/JS any day. It's infinitely easier than whatever native tech there is. I did not try Flutter or SwiftUI though. Those are most modern frameworks, may be they improved.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  There is that most desktop UI frameworks don't appear to be built with programmatic creation in mind. Most webdev I've done involved a text editor to make my UI, while native (debatable, it's been Qt, Java Swing, WinForms, and waaay back when HyperCard) almost always involved a UI designer that would make hooks I could write plumbing code for. I definitely prefer desktop dev with a UI designer over webdev any day, but the webdev API (if I have to use an API to create my UI) is generally better. I'd never write desktop UI toolkit code by hand. I tried with Java Swing and it sucked, and the one time I was forced to use Qt Quick via code it was just JSON/JS anyway.
  - dusted 5y ago
    Yes, I'm _IMPRESSED_ by the lousy state of modern "ui" design tools for web.. It's still 1970 in web land.. having to use a text editor and not one, not two but THREE different syntaxes and languages (at least) to produce a working web user interface.. Even in early 90s we had excellent (amazingly excellent +++ compared to web) desktop gui design tools, that were easy drag and drop things.. 10 year old me made his first windows executable with a gui and buttons on his windows 95 machine..
    - jart 5y ago
      What do you want to see happen? Macromedia Dreamweaver? That's actually a great example of bloatware that we managed to roll back. It was an excellent piece of software, but it was only useful if you believed that your website needed to be bloated with ten layers of nested tables in order to be socially acceptable, since back then everyone wanted to be a "portal" that looked like the Yahoo home page. Then Google came along with their nearly empty homepage like a blinding ray of sunshine with a razor sharp focus on the things people actually wanted, and it redefined the aesthetics of prestige. Web bloat stopped being associated with professionalism and simple became trendy. So I don't think the struggle against bloatware is hopeless. We have the tools now to create and easily distribute many forms of conventional software without the cosmetic complexity. One morning we could wake to see trendsetters using it and things will change.
      - dusted 5y ago
        You're making my point for me. Native applications. That, or an entirely new approach to application platform than the HTML+CSS+JS/wasm abomination that we have today, an api and underlying platform that is actually built for making graphical user interfaces for interactive computer programs, rather than glorified newspaper pages. I want a platform that allows for the creation of tools that are easy and convenient to use to create nice looking, performant, unbloated UI, tools like the winforms designer or JFormDesigner or qt designer or glade.. What do they have in common ? They produce fairly unbloated code for their target language/platform, are nice and convenient to use and are not able to generate good html/css/js output.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > SpaceX uses Electron in space I would really like to read more about this, do you have an links or material where they discuss the use of Electron as part of their tech stack?
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Here's related reddit AMA thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/we_are_the_spacex_software_team_ask_us_anything/ft0aip8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/we_are_the_s...
- squarefoot 5y ago
  > SpaceX uses Electron in space. Yes, but it's relegated to the UI. Not much different from many products that used Visual Basic GUIs to talk with embedded systems in the 90s through serial ports: VB could not touch the critical code, and if the interface bombed they would just reload it. That didn't make VB good for mission critical software though. Electron aside, I find the use of touch screens in these applications one of the stupidest choices ever: operating it while the spacecraft is shaking due to an emergency would be problematic, then it would need just a small crack in the touch sensitive layer to render the entire control panel inoperable. Luckily they know that and have the most critical functions replicated to real buttons.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Don't get us started on car touchscreen controls...
- clownpenis_fart 5y ago
  it's literally impossible to lay out a bunch of rectangles on a screen without using a full blown web browser

Also existence of Electron and other, similar technologies.

by xvilka 5y ago

Also existence of Electron and other, similar technologies.

Electron is pretty capable technology. SpaceX uses Electron in space. I recently reverse-engineered firmware of some small device with tiny screen and underpowered CPU. It used Electron for its GUI. I would say that issue is not Electron itself. Issue is other GUI frameworks which are so terrible that developers prefer Electron despite its objective issues. I spent good amount of time learning WinAPI, learning MFC, learning Delphi, learning Swing, learning JavaFX, learning a little bit of WinForms. I wrote few native Android apps and iOS apps. I'm not an expert, but I saw enough APIs. I'm mostly backend developer. I know JS, but only enough to be able to read the code and do some modifications. If I would need to write GUI, I'd write it with HTML/CSS/JS any day. It's infinitely easier than whatever native tech there is. I did not try Flutter or SwiftUI though. Those are most modern frameworks, may be they improved.

boondaburrah 5y ago
There is that most desktop UI frameworks don't appear to be built with programmatic creation in mind. Most webdev I've done involved a text editor to make my UI, while native (debatable, it's been Qt, Java Swing, WinForms, and waaay back when HyperCard) almost always involved a UI designer that would make hooks I could write plumbing code for. I definitely prefer desktop dev with a UI designer over webdev any day, but the webdev API (if I have to use an API to create my UI) is generally better. I'd never write desktop UI toolkit code by hand. I tried with Java Swing and it sucked, and the one time I was forced to use Qt Quick via code it was just JSON/JS anyway.
- dusted 5y ago
  Yes, I'm _IMPRESSED_ by the lousy state of modern "ui" design tools for web.. It's still 1970 in web land.. having to use a text editor and not one, not two but THREE different syntaxes and languages (at least) to produce a working web user interface.. Even in early 90s we had excellent (amazingly excellent +++ compared to web) desktop gui design tools, that were easy drag and drop things.. 10 year old me made his first windows executable with a gui and buttons on his windows 95 machine..
  - jart 5y ago
    What do you want to see happen? Macromedia Dreamweaver? That's actually a great example of bloatware that we managed to roll back. It was an excellent piece of software, but it was only useful if you believed that your website needed to be bloated with ten layers of nested tables in order to be socially acceptable, since back then everyone wanted to be a "portal" that looked like the Yahoo home page. Then Google came along with their nearly empty homepage like a blinding ray of sunshine with a razor sharp focus on the things people actually wanted, and it redefined the aesthetics of prestige. Web bloat stopped being associated with professionalism and simple became trendy. So I don't think the struggle against bloatware is hopeless. We have the tools now to create and easily distribute many forms of conventional software without the cosmetic complexity. One morning we could wake to see trendsetters using it and things will change.
    - dusted 5y ago
      You're making my point for me. Native applications. That, or an entirely new approach to application platform than the HTML+CSS+JS/wasm abomination that we have today, an api and underlying platform that is actually built for making graphical user interfaces for interactive computer programs, rather than glorified newspaper pages. I want a platform that allows for the creation of tools that are easy and convenient to use to create nice looking, performant, unbloated UI, tools like the winforms designer or JFormDesigner or qt designer or glade.. What do they have in common ? They produce fairly unbloated code for their target language/platform, are nice and convenient to use and are not able to generate good html/css/js output.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> SpaceX uses Electron in space I would really like to read more about this, do you have an links or material where they discuss the use of Electron as part of their tech stack?
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Here's related reddit AMA thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/we_are_the_spacex_software_team_ask_us_anything/ft0aip8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/we_are_the_s...
squarefoot 5y ago
> SpaceX uses Electron in space. Yes, but it's relegated to the UI. Not much different from many products that used Visual Basic GUIs to talk with embedded systems in the 90s through serial ports: VB could not touch the critical code, and if the interface bombed they would just reload it. That didn't make VB good for mission critical software though. Electron aside, I find the use of touch screens in these applications one of the stupidest choices ever: operating it while the spacecraft is shaking due to an emergency would be problematic, then it would need just a small crack in the touch sensitive layer to render the entire control panel inoperable. Luckily they know that and have the most critical functions replicated to real buttons.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Don't get us started on car touchscreen controls...
clownpenis_fart 5y ago
it's literally impossible to lay out a bunch of rectangles on a screen without using a full blown web browser