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The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavo

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Hiring experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive, hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap - shittier performance is the tradeoff to instantly have access to every platform. It's not a coincidence that Electron apps like e.g. Slack, Spotify, Discord are massively dominant players in their markets, I doubt you'd look the engineering leads of these companies in the face and tell them that you believe they put no thought into the tradeoffs of Electron and that they're just following trends.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
That's because Windows, Mac and all 1000 versions of Linux are intentionally incompatible silos. The only thing common is a standardized Web platform. "Hello World" shouldn't take 115 mb and trillion computer cycles, period.
bengale 5y ago
The whole “newness” idea seems odd anyway considering electron must be coming on ten years old now. > The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". This is spot on. I’ve worked on a big electron project before for a massive firm and a lot of work was done before picking that direction. Proof of concept was done for a couple of alternatives but electron ended up better on balance.
com2kid 5y ago
> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004. 2022, your sales team needs to access inventory levels in a database. Assuming you haven't already been sold some multi-million dollar solution to do this (and you likely have, multiple times, and at least some of the implementations have failed), you now have the following requirements: 1. Some of your employees use Apple laptops, some use Windows. 2. People want to be able to access the data on their phones as well, which adds another 2 OSes to the mix. 3. Restricting the app to being onsite in the office doesn't cut it. So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Now, native apps on smart phones are a constant maintenance headache. Major OS releases break things on mobile all the time, and entire APIs get deprecated. (Another reason why writing against Windows is good, that Winforms app from 2004 probably runs just fine with 0 changes in 2022) It is easier to maintain 1 website than 2 mobile apps and 2 desktop apps. So, website it is. What framework are you going to use? Whatever one is stable, easy to hire for, and has the best tooling. OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it. Of course the docs suck compared to what Microsoft had in 2004, because it turns out part of that $500 per seat license for Visual Studio went towards amazing documentation and example code. And because Web you'll get breaking changes now and then, but it still is easier than maintaining 4 native apps. People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop against. A major OS version came out what, once every 3 or 4 years? And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Or you can adopt a free software / open source simple app building solution for all four OSes (or, hm, at least three of them -- not quite sure about iOS) that compiles natively on these and many other OSes. Sure, the UI would preferably be designed differently for desktop vs small-screen mobile, but you have that problem with Electron too, don't you?
- avereveard 5y ago
  you're not wrong, but react/electron aren't the same ballpark as winform, flutter or xamarin forms are.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    React Native is a direct competitor to Flutter. And internal websites are a direct competitor to Winforms. Every year someone telling me Xamarine forms is better now, but every year someone tells me that they tried Xamarine forms the year prior and it still wasn't any good. My one experience with Xamarine forms was watching 3 apps teams (WinPhone, Android, and iOS) all struggle to write an app. Given that it took 3 teams, and it was a large effort, I wasn't impressed, but this was 6 or so years ago. I hope things have improved since then! Fun fact, for awhile Silverlight was huge in the internal website world, and Microsoft could have easily had another decade of lock-in going on, but then MS killed Silverlight due to internal politics, and even the most loyal MS customers saw the writing on the wall and redirected their internal development efforts elsewhere. 90s Microsoft would never have abandoned a technology stack that had wide spread internal corporate adoption. :/
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Don't forget supporting several localizations, currencies, timezones, and reformatting numbers and seperators dependent on region & user preference. Alrighty, BRB while I finish my dropdown for converting from metric to "donkeyhooves per camelpower."
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on. But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases is that these Electron apps can often just be websites.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as they do everywhere else. That is a huge advantage. I’ve got a significant amount of software that is realistically only on Linux because of electron.
  - CitrusFruits 5y ago
    Ii run Slack outside of a tab and in its app format because it's easier to navigate to using keyboard shortcuts and OS level features. That may not be enough for you, but it's plenty reason for me, and I imagine many others.
    - ozfive 5y ago
      Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.
      - codefined 5y ago
        Not a Slack user here. Is the app version _slower_ than the website? I assumed that since Electron is only a little bit more than a Chromium wrapper that they would have identical performance.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> shittier performance Depends what you're writing. People aren't going to write performance-sensitive apps in Electron, like FPS games where customers demand 4K 120 FPS with full graphics enabled. But for Image burners (balena), Drone software (Betaflight), and Sophisticated code editors (VSCode), it's hardly a concern.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Hum... We are down in a thread where people are complaining it takes several seconds to see a set of text messages.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    Yeah, it's worth pointing out that people are blaming electron for what's wrong with Slack. When, perhaps, it's just Slack itself that sucks? I use Discord all the time, which is one hell of an oranges-to-oranges comparison (with Slack), and not only does it have none of the perf problems of Slack, it's also faster and snappier than any NATIVE chat app I've used. There's a lot that can be done wrong in any framework; as recently as windows xp, there were a few atrocious algorithmic-complexity gaffes in basic file viewing (directories with more than a few hundred files would slow to a crawl in the GUI, taking multiple minutes to display). It wasn't the fault of the framework it was written in; it's just that someone at MS had written something that had to scan the directory in a hurry, and ended up accidentally writing an exponential-time algorithm. Slack likely has a few deep-seated goofs in their architecture that are just too big to extract and fix.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      If nearly every single professionally written and quality vetted code created on JS is so slow that it takes several seconds to do things that software used to do instantly 60 years ago, is this really not a problem with the language? Yes, JS can be much faster than every single piece of it you will find people using. It's just that every developer that has some main focus different from execution performance is holding it wrong.
vmception 5y ago
And then they’ll complain about ageism in tech!
ryandrake 5y ago
I mean, this isn't the first time in history that quality and performance got thrown under the bus for the sake of cost. When developer salaries are your highest cost, and you have to make more and more money, eventually everything will get (and has gotten) sacrificed at the altar of "developer cost". Historically, commercial software development has never been the place for perfectionist "software craftsmanship". If you want to make the world's fastest performing, native, bug-free, warning-and-lint-free, most beautiful and elegant software project, you're going to have your lunch eaten by the competitor who throws together a barely-working, bloated JavaScript mess in 1/10 the time. The people who take pride and "sand the back of the cabinet" go out of business. At the end of the day, customers (broad generalization) don't seem to care about performance or quality. So, purely by survival of the fittest, these frameworks are going to take over every software project they possibly can. Sad if you care about native/performance, but inevitable as the tide.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if Electron was less resource intensive, yes. There's Tauri and other alternatives that will eventually replace it and solve the performance problem. You can blame OS vendors for trying to build a moat with OS-specific, not web-compatible UI toolkits. Don't want to touch that, don't have to, thankfully.
  - bmeski 5y ago
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      I learn plenty of technologies - those that I want or need. I neither want nor need to learn any desktop GUI frameworks for my purposes, so I don't. Certainly not going to do anything just because some troll told me to.
BeefWellington 5y ago
> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development. What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.
- indigochill 5y ago
  And yet the market (the users) choose to use Slack over alternatives. If this lost productivity was a problem for the general market, Slack wouldn't have the market share it has.
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    From what I can see Slack's market share is dwarfed by Teams'[0][1] and similar to Discord's[2]. This is not strictly an argument against your broader point as I believe all these apps are essentially the same in technology stack. Regardless, it's hard to look at that one feature and determine that conclusion from it. There's a of other pros and cons to be weighed when making any kind of decision like this. I'd suggest hosting, overall UX, and corporate support probably make up far more of the critical success factors for these kinds of apps than their older competitors. The lost productivity and poor performance are the cost of these other features, apparently. Perhaps in the future there will be a new disruptor to the market that will do this same thing but with a fully-native client application that is stabler and more performant than their competitors. [0]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/ [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/ [2]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti...
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    But all the chat apps are Electron now, except Google chat, which is a PWA (I know, also available as an Electron app). There are no major native chat apps left to use as a reference.
jimbob45 5y ago
To be fair, Discord is only as popular as it is because Microsoft was insistent upon alienating its Skype user base to the maximum extent of its ability.
rdiddly 5y ago
I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to computers either, or even the private sector. In a past career I was a civil engineer, and I learned about how traffic light green times (how many seconds a signal stays green for one direction vs. the cross street) usually have a "right answer" from an engineering standpoint, which as you can imagine, has to do with maximizing traffic throughput and/or minimizing delays to each individual vehicle. And then the mayor of the town shows up out of the blue and says no, this direction is going to have a longer wait, I'm going to delay people intentionally, so that when they're stuck in traffic, sitting there, they'll have more of a chance to see signs/placards of, and contemplate patronizing, nearby businesses, whose owners are my political backers. That made a big impression on me... must have, because I feel like I've told that story in an HN comment before... but anyway... yep.
- stemlord 5y ago
  Well it's a net negative for the end user, which should have been the priority for everyone involved, and what you're describing sounds like a corruption of this system. So I wouldn't call it an engineering thing, it seems far more general than that.
  - hellisothers 5y ago
    Unless the product would have never been shipped if it could only be done natively.
    - wtetzner 5y ago
      Sometimes no product is better than a bad product.
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
    It's not corruption. I'm just mad that my Qt skills are worthless now. It's hard detaching my ego as a programmer from the economics of programming.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 5y ago
to be fair though, isn't "it's cheaper" just the same thing the article laments from the consumer side? It just extends the argument from "devs are cheap" to "users are cheap as well" the overriding concern seems to be that if we continue to stack crappy tech on top of crappy tech and accept it as consumers for twenty years we've built the tower of Babel (some might argue we're there already) and that this is terrible long term engineering. If we treated semiconductors or aerospace engineering the same way we wouldn't have any chips to run electron software on and the planes would keep falling out of the sky.
bogdanoff_2 5y ago
What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Is it actually that much cheaper? And if so, why? Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares?
- lmm 5y ago
  > What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Mainly a huge existing (and ongoing) investment from Google. > Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares? Not enough money in it for a company that would make something properly polished, and the open-source stuff works well enough for its own developers and gets bikeshedded to death whenever anyone tries to add good defaults and provide an easy onramp (if anyone even cares enough to try). Like, in theory you could glue together something with Python, Qt, PySide and Freeze where someone can write two lines of Python, push a button, and get GUI executables for all major platforms. But good luck getting anyone to accept your patches or commit to not breaking compatibility with what you're doing.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  A huge pipeline of labor who understands it and mature tooling that creates a much lower skill floor for labor to be productive. Bootcamps, tutorials, freelancers, contractors, there's a _lot_ of resources in all sorts of languages about web development. Many fewer resources on trading packets over TCP, or making a desktop GUI, and even fewer on cross-platform GUIs.
duxup 5y ago
I’m on a team of 3. React Native and similar options allow us to do so much more than we otherwise would.
depsypher 5y ago
Totally agree. And I'd argue it's not even a new trend. Consider Infocom's Z-machine. What was that if not the Electron of its day? And the right decision from both a technical and business perspective.
emadabdulrahim 5y ago
A bit of a digression, but iMessages is supposed to be a native app and it sucks ass on macOS. buggy, slow to load previous messages, and have to force quite from time to time. From my experience, many native apps suck. But a lot of them are good. Same goes for electron apps. Also, native app development process is way worse than solutions like electron and react native in terms of feedback loop and DX. Ofc they have downsides as well since they're abstraction layers.
zrm 5y ago
We can kind of see how this happened. There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make apps multi-platform. Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. They have the most market share. Before Electron existed, people would just write native apps for Windows and nothing else, locking people into Microsoft. Apple has resources, they have the right incentive because they don't have dominant market share on desktop, but they're obsessed with native look and feel. Cross platform frameworks are antithetical to that, so they don't do it. That leaves the Linux people. So we get Qt. Finally something that works. Except that this is the opposite of what the Linux people are good at. It's not "do one thing do it well," it's reimplementing the equivalent of an entire operating system's APIs on at least three different operating systems. That's a lot of work, it's hard to do right and easy to get wrong, and they don't have a mountain of cash behind them. So it works but it's full of sharp edges. Enter Electron. Browsers had to deal with the same multi-platform nonsense but Google does have a mountain of cash so it's easier to use. Winner, efficiency be damned. What might have worked if anybody there thought of it would be for Apple to port their native APIs to Windows (because it has the most market share) and Linux (because it's a fellow Unix-like so that should be pretty easy). Then you could easily compile native macOS applications for other platforms but they would still be native on macOS. That solves their problem because now everybody is going to target their native API, and if they run less well on Windows, that's fine as long as they run at least as well as Electron does. Big win for them because now that becomes the target and they're the only ones with true native applications. But is modern Apple smart enough to do that?
- 5sp 5y ago
  not with Steve's dead.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui
  - martneumann 5y ago
andrewjl 5y ago
> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Cheaper sounds like something that is always the right thing to aim at, but it also constrains the product and the business around it to a model that has shrinking margins. That might be the best bet to make. It rarely results in durable businesses. Unless there's some other sort of moat in play.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
I definitely empathise with the author. The web space is particularly prone to fashion driven development (FDD). Despite that I think he's a bit off the mark. Most consumer facing development isnt and has never been "engineering" outside of safety critical applications. It's more akin to domestic plumbing. You're connecting existing components together and while there's a skill to it, the skill ceiling isn't that high. Programming however (as opposed to development), even where software engineering does take place, is a craft. It's something that you learn by doing and it takes time to learn to do it well. Modern frameworks and software development techniques are often the equivalent to handing a complete amateur the keys to a fully equipped wood working shop, complete with laser cutters, CNC routers and a load of power tools and letting them have at it with only a few YouTube videos for guidance. Sure they'll be able to make things, and larger and more impressive things than if they could only use hand tools, but the resulting creations will be over engineered, or rickety, or just plain badly designed compared to furniture created by someone who's spent a few years apprenticed to a master craftsman. And you know what, that's fine. 99% of web development is still teenagers desperate to be the next Elon Musk hawking Tinder for marmosets to VCs, WordPress sites and e-commerce. It doesn't matter if it's a bit shit and is developed by people who learned their craft on Udemy and by watching 10 ways to turn yourself into a l33t programmer videos. The concerning thing is when that philosophy starts to infect areas where actual safety critical software engineering is done. No one wants a l33t programmer with massive scrum skillz designing the control system for a nuclear reactor...
blub 5y ago
Such web solutions are cheaper because the software market is really sick. There is almost no point in competing on quality and performance for consumer software, because some start-up with hundreds of millions of VC funding or some SW megacorp will enter the market and give their mediocre product away for free while paying engineers N times more than what you can offer. Bonus points if the software is at least partly open source or integrates with some standard (which will get nixed once they have enough market share). And those VCs and that CEO won't be particularly concerned with technical excellence, they'll focus on their metrics regarding user acquisitions, market share, etc. Since technical excellence is of at best secondary importance, it makes sense to commoditise the technology and make it as easy as possible to build such applications. Build some framework, give it away for free, ideally open source. Brag about how you're enriching the world through your open source contributions. Optionally snicker at the fact that you're in fact controlling how things get built on the so-called open web. Relax on your yacht while drinking a good champagne. Don't explain to the poor sods still worrying their brains about technology why "the economics" prevent building quality software, because you don't give a fuck anyway. One of your employees or the employee of some other web company will surely set aside some time to clarify this, like the good little employee that they are.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Horribly cynical... And oh so true. (Because sometimes, reality is horribly cynical.)
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Comment fails to account for user perspective. As a user I do not want Electron nor React. It does not solve a problem for me, it creates a new one.^1 I would rather someone like UNIXSheikh make the "engineering" decisions. 1. I avoid both Electron and React. I like UNIX. Runs on many platforms.
- bengale 5y ago
  You're in the minority. Companies don't need to appeal to every potential customer, just a large portion of them.
gyulai 5y ago
> hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap But this is the point: Technological development could go in one of two directions: Allow skilled people to build increasingly bigger and better things, or allow increasingly low-skilled people to displace the skilled people by creating things that are worse but still vaguely fit-for-purpose. -- The industry is going the latter path, which is highly offensive to those skilled people.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> Hiring experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive, So it looks like software would vastly improve if silicon valley companies moved to india or russia or some other place with abundant supply of capable developers. Regardless, what you said doesnt show that it was a strawman, it was still a valid conclusion, but you re offering the real reason behind it.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse. True, and the author highlights the benefit himself. Maybe there is an underlying truth here as the number of users isn't indicative of quality and they might be successful if implemented differently. Apps like Teams are a severe resource hog, software is getting slower even if machines improve. I use electron myself for visualization, but I know it is not the optimal choice.
dachryn 5y ago
and thats exactly his problem. Its about dumbifying the development cycle, with often terrible results for the end-user. Its a race to the bottom about 'how low can we go' and 'what will our users tolerate'. Not all Electron apps are bad, but thats because they are still doing a ton of work to actually make it a little bit smoother. But this is in spite of Electron, not thanks to Electron. Its a race to mediocrity on every platform
Jetrel 5y ago
The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's such a staggering, one-sided comparison in "fit and finish", attention to detail, and not having weird little bugs that never get fixed. I say this as a former OS partisan, but even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools", is way behind the curve. Steam, too, is now an electron app. The thing that's just the brutal nail in the coffin is — if it just had the attributes mentioned above, it'd be a huge win. But to have "nearly perfect cross-platform support out of the box with no effort?" Jesus. The thing about electron is — some 5 years from now, we're likely to start shipping electron apps that run on WebASM rather than JS, and at that point, there won't be any valid counterargument. They'll have all the benefits, and run just as fast and lean. Game over.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. [...] even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools You've never used Delphi, FP/Lazarus, or even Visual Basic, have you? ___ [Edited to add (equally erroneous) Apple quote.]
- gwillz 5y ago
  I'd argue that Steam isn't 'now' an electron app but was the OG 'electron' app. The store and community interface have always been web UI from day one. Originally it wrapped the IE/trident engine and then transitioned to chromium.
resonious 5y ago
Indeed. This bit: "... now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse." is actually true and a good thing.
taurusnoises 5y ago
The author isn't "fighting a strawman." It's called venting. The author is venting. It's really quite harmless.
torginus 5y ago
I think the underlying explanation for this is that the world sucks. Most of the companies that are commonly thought of as tech companies aren't. My definition of a tech company is a company that lives and dies by the quality of technology they make. For example Nvidia is a tech company. If someone made GPUs that are half the price, but twice as fast, Nvidia would be out of business in a jiffy. Spotify isn't a tech company - if someone made a better music player, they wouldn't be able to disrupt Spotify, unless they somehow managed to make a deal with every record label under the sun. In the 2000s, I had a 20GB Music folder full of music I liked, and I played them using Winamp, which supported searching my library as fast as I could type. It didn't have all of Spotify's features, but the it did the core value proposition of playing music better than Spotify does today imo. The problem is that Spotify is a package deal - if you like the service, then you must use the client - and they are under no competitive pressure to make a better one. The 'it's much cheaper' argument is ridiculous - it's not that hard to create a native app that plays music - I doubt the people who wrote Winamp commanded the salaries FAANG people writing Electron apps do today. 'Tech' companies make much more money today than when they were making when they were writing native stuff.
- tlavoie 5y ago
  There are other players that use Spotify's API. For one example, ncspot is a command-line terminal-style program written in Rust with librespot.
jrm4 5y ago
I mean, you named the precious few that don't suck, and two of them do essentially the same thing, and the other is a music player with a very questionable business model. I'm with the op. I'm deeply unimpressed with the last decade or so of software development; and that's not just blowing smoke -- this is day to day practice. With the exception of Discord, I deliberately take pains to use old software because it's better. Moreover, I find when I show non-tech folk "how I do things with old software," most want to learn more, and nearly none are satisfied with what they are "given."

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

That's because Windows, Mac and all 1000 versions of Linux are intentionally incompatible silos. The only thing common is a standardized Web platform. "Hello World" shouldn't take 115 mb and trillion computer cycles, period.

bengale 5y ago

The whole “newness” idea seems odd anyway considering electron must be coming on ten years old now. > The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". This is spot on. I’ve worked on a big electron project before for a massive firm and a lot of work was done before picking that direction. Proof of concept was done for a couple of alternatives but electron ended up better on balance.

com2kid 5y ago

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004. 2022, your sales team needs to access inventory levels in a database. Assuming you haven't already been sold some multi-million dollar solution to do this (and you likely have, multiple times, and at least some of the implementations have failed), you now have the following requirements: 1. Some of your employees use Apple laptops, some use Windows. 2. People want to be able to access the data on their phones as well, which adds another 2 OSes to the mix. 3. Restricting the app to being onsite in the office doesn't cut it. So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Now, native apps on smart phones are a constant maintenance headache. Major OS releases break things on mobile all the time, and entire APIs get deprecated. (Another reason why writing against Windows is good, that Winforms app from 2004 probably runs just fine with 0 changes in 2022) It is easier to maintain 1 website than 2 mobile apps and 2 desktop apps. So, website it is. What framework are you going to use? Whatever one is stable, easy to hire for, and has the best tooling. OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it. Of course the docs suck compared to what Microsoft had in 2004, because it turns out part of that $500 per seat license for Visual Studio went towards amazing documentation and example code. And because Web you'll get breaking changes now and then, but it still is easier than maintaining 4 native apps. People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop against. A major OS version came out what, once every 3 or 4 years? And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.

CRConrad 5y ago
> So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Or you can adopt a free software / open source simple app building solution for all four OSes (or, hm, at least three of them -- not quite sure about iOS) that compiles natively on these and many other OSes. Sure, the UI would preferably be designed differently for desktop vs small-screen mobile, but you have that problem with Electron too, don't you?
avereveard 5y ago
you're not wrong, but react/electron aren't the same ballpark as winform, flutter or xamarin forms are.
- com2kid 5y ago
  React Native is a direct competitor to Flutter. And internal websites are a direct competitor to Winforms. Every year someone telling me Xamarine forms is better now, but every year someone tells me that they tried Xamarine forms the year prior and it still wasn't any good. My one experience with Xamarine forms was watching 3 apps teams (WinPhone, Android, and iOS) all struggle to write an app. Given that it took 3 teams, and it was a large effort, I wasn't impressed, but this was 6 or so years ago. I hope things have improved since then! Fun fact, for awhile Silverlight was huge in the internal website world, and Microsoft could have easily had another decade of lock-in going on, but then MS killed Silverlight due to internal politics, and even the most loyal MS customers saw the writing on the wall and redirected their internal development efforts elsewhere. 90s Microsoft would never have abandoned a technology stack that had wide spread internal corporate adoption. :/
erosenbe0 5y ago
Don't forget supporting several localizations, currencies, timezones, and reformatting numbers and seperators dependent on region & user preference. Alrighty, BRB while I finish my dropdown for converting from metric to "donkeyhooves per camelpower."

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on. But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases is that these Electron apps can often just be websites.

n8cpdx 5y ago
I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as they do everywhere else. That is a huge advantage. I’ve got a significant amount of software that is realistically only on Linux because of electron.
- CitrusFruits 5y ago
  Ii run Slack outside of a tab and in its app format because it's easier to navigate to using keyboard shortcuts and OS level features. That may not be enough for you, but it's plenty reason for me, and I imagine many others.
  - ozfive 5y ago
    Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.
    - codefined 5y ago
      Not a Slack user here. Is the app version _slower_ than the website? I assumed that since Electron is only a little bit more than a Chromium wrapper that they would have identical performance.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> shittier performance Depends what you're writing. People aren't going to write performance-sensitive apps in Electron, like FPS games where customers demand 4K 120 FPS with full graphics enabled. But for Image burners (balena), Drone software (Betaflight), and Sophisticated code editors (VSCode), it's hardly a concern.

marcosdumay 5y ago
Hum... We are down in a thread where people are complaining it takes several seconds to see a set of text messages.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  Yeah, it's worth pointing out that people are blaming electron for what's wrong with Slack. When, perhaps, it's just Slack itself that sucks? I use Discord all the time, which is one hell of an oranges-to-oranges comparison (with Slack), and not only does it have none of the perf problems of Slack, it's also faster and snappier than any NATIVE chat app I've used. There's a lot that can be done wrong in any framework; as recently as windows xp, there were a few atrocious algorithmic-complexity gaffes in basic file viewing (directories with more than a few hundred files would slow to a crawl in the GUI, taking multiple minutes to display). It wasn't the fault of the framework it was written in; it's just that someone at MS had written something that had to scan the directory in a hurry, and ended up accidentally writing an exponential-time algorithm. Slack likely has a few deep-seated goofs in their architecture that are just too big to extract and fix.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    If nearly every single professionally written and quality vetted code created on JS is so slow that it takes several seconds to do things that software used to do instantly 60 years ago, is this really not a problem with the language? Yes, JS can be much faster than every single piece of it you will find people using. It's just that every developer that has some main focus different from execution performance is holding it wrong.

vmception 5y ago

And then they’ll complain about ageism in tech!

ryandrake 5y ago

I mean, this isn't the first time in history that quality and performance got thrown under the bus for the sake of cost. When developer salaries are your highest cost, and you have to make more and more money, eventually everything will get (and has gotten) sacrificed at the altar of "developer cost". Historically, commercial software development has never been the place for perfectionist "software craftsmanship". If you want to make the world's fastest performing, native, bug-free, warning-and-lint-free, most beautiful and elegant software project, you're going to have your lunch eaten by the competitor who throws together a barely-working, bloated JavaScript mess in 1/10 the time. The people who take pride and "sand the back of the cabinet" go out of business. At the end of the day, customers (broad generalization) don't seem to care about performance or quality. So, purely by survival of the fittest, these frameworks are going to take over every software project they possibly can. Sad if you care about native/performance, but inevitable as the tide.

clusterfish 5y ago
It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if Electron was less resource intensive, yes. There's Tauri and other alternatives that will eventually replace it and solve the performance problem. You can blame OS vendors for trying to build a moat with OS-specific, not web-compatible UI toolkits. Don't want to touch that, don't have to, thankfully.
- bmeski 5y ago
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    I learn plenty of technologies - those that I want or need. I neither want nor need to learn any desktop GUI frameworks for my purposes, so I don't. Certainly not going to do anything just because some troll told me to.

BeefWellington 5y ago

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development. What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.

indigochill 5y ago
And yet the market (the users) choose to use Slack over alternatives. If this lost productivity was a problem for the general market, Slack wouldn't have the market share it has.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  From what I can see Slack's market share is dwarfed by Teams'[0][1] and similar to Discord's[2]. This is not strictly an argument against your broader point as I believe all these apps are essentially the same in technology stack. Regardless, it's hard to look at that one feature and determine that conclusion from it. There's a of other pros and cons to be weighed when making any kind of decision like this. I'd suggest hosting, overall UX, and corporate support probably make up far more of the critical success factors for these kinds of apps than their older competitors. The lost productivity and poor performance are the cost of these other features, apparently. Perhaps in the future there will be a new disruptor to the market that will do this same thing but with a fully-native client application that is stabler and more performant than their competitors. [0]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/ [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/ [2]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti...
- mrweasel 5y ago
  But all the chat apps are Electron now, except Google chat, which is a PWA (I know, also available as an Electron app). There are no major native chat apps left to use as a reference.

jimbob45 5y ago

To be fair, Discord is only as popular as it is because Microsoft was insistent upon alienating its Skype user base to the maximum extent of its ability.

rdiddly 5y ago

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to computers either, or even the private sector. In a past career I was a civil engineer, and I learned about how traffic light green times (how many seconds a signal stays green for one direction vs. the cross street) usually have a "right answer" from an engineering standpoint, which as you can imagine, has to do with maximizing traffic throughput and/or minimizing delays to each individual vehicle. And then the mayor of the town shows up out of the blue and says no, this direction is going to have a longer wait, I'm going to delay people intentionally, so that when they're stuck in traffic, sitting there, they'll have more of a chance to see signs/placards of, and contemplate patronizing, nearby businesses, whose owners are my political backers. That made a big impression on me... must have, because I feel like I've told that story in an HN comment before... but anyway... yep.

stemlord 5y ago
Well it's a net negative for the end user, which should have been the priority for everyone involved, and what you're describing sounds like a corruption of this system. So I wouldn't call it an engineering thing, it seems far more general than that.
- hellisothers 5y ago
  Unless the product would have never been shipped if it could only be done natively.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    Sometimes no product is better than a bad product.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  It's not corruption. I'm just mad that my Qt skills are worthless now. It's hard detaching my ego as a programmer from the economics of programming.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Barrin92 5y ago

to be fair though, isn't "it's cheaper" just the same thing the article laments from the consumer side? It just extends the argument from "devs are cheap" to "users are cheap as well" the overriding concern seems to be that if we continue to stack crappy tech on top of crappy tech and accept it as consumers for twenty years we've built the tower of Babel (some might argue we're there already) and that this is terrible long term engineering. If we treated semiconductors or aerospace engineering the same way we wouldn't have any chips to run electron software on and the planes would keep falling out of the sky.

bogdanoff_2 5y ago

What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Is it actually that much cheaper? And if so, why? Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares?

lmm 5y ago
> What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Mainly a huge existing (and ongoing) investment from Google. > Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares? Not enough money in it for a company that would make something properly polished, and the open-source stuff works well enough for its own developers and gets bikeshedded to death whenever anyone tries to add good defaults and provide an easy onramp (if anyone even cares enough to try). Like, in theory you could glue together something with Python, Qt, PySide and Freeze where someone can write two lines of Python, push a button, and get GUI executables for all major platforms. But good luck getting anyone to accept your patches or commit to not breaking compatibility with what you're doing.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
A huge pipeline of labor who understands it and mature tooling that creates a much lower skill floor for labor to be productive. Bootcamps, tutorials, freelancers, contractors, there's a _lot_ of resources in all sorts of languages about web development. Many fewer resources on trading packets over TCP, or making a desktop GUI, and even fewer on cross-platform GUIs.

duxup 5y ago

I’m on a team of 3. React Native and similar options allow us to do so much more than we otherwise would.

depsypher 5y ago

Totally agree. And I'd argue it's not even a new trend. Consider Infocom's Z-machine. What was that if not the Electron of its day? And the right decision from both a technical and business perspective.

emadabdulrahim 5y ago

A bit of a digression, but iMessages is supposed to be a native app and it sucks ass on macOS. buggy, slow to load previous messages, and have to force quite from time to time. From my experience, many native apps suck. But a lot of them are good. Same goes for electron apps. Also, native app development process is way worse than solutions like electron and react native in terms of feedback loop and DX. Ofc they have downsides as well since they're abstraction layers.

zrm 5y ago

We can kind of see how this happened. There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make apps multi-platform. Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. They have the most market share. Before Electron existed, people would just write native apps for Windows and nothing else, locking people into Microsoft. Apple has resources, they have the right incentive because they don't have dominant market share on desktop, but they're obsessed with native look and feel. Cross platform frameworks are antithetical to that, so they don't do it. That leaves the Linux people. So we get Qt. Finally something that works. Except that this is the opposite of what the Linux people are good at. It's not "do one thing do it well," it's reimplementing the equivalent of an entire operating system's APIs on at least three different operating systems. That's a lot of work, it's hard to do right and easy to get wrong, and they don't have a mountain of cash behind them. So it works but it's full of sharp edges. Enter Electron. Browsers had to deal with the same multi-platform nonsense but Google does have a mountain of cash so it's easier to use. Winner, efficiency be damned. What might have worked if anybody there thought of it would be for Apple to port their native APIs to Windows (because it has the most market share) and Linux (because it's a fellow Unix-like so that should be pretty easy). Then you could easily compile native macOS applications for other platforms but they would still be native on macOS. That solves their problem because now everybody is going to target their native API, and if they run less well on Windows, that's fine as long as they run at least as well as Electron does. Big win for them because now that becomes the target and they're the only ones with true native applications. But is modern Apple smart enough to do that?

5sp 5y ago
not with Steve's dead.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui
- martneumann 5y ago

andrewjl 5y ago

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Cheaper sounds like something that is always the right thing to aim at, but it also constrains the product and the business around it to a model that has shrinking margins. That might be the best bet to make. It rarely results in durable businesses. Unless there's some other sort of moat in play.

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

I definitely empathise with the author. The web space is particularly prone to fashion driven development (FDD). Despite that I think he's a bit off the mark. Most consumer facing development isnt and has never been "engineering" outside of safety critical applications. It's more akin to domestic plumbing. You're connecting existing components together and while there's a skill to it, the skill ceiling isn't that high. Programming however (as opposed to development), even where software engineering does take place, is a craft. It's something that you learn by doing and it takes time to learn to do it well. Modern frameworks and software development techniques are often the equivalent to handing a complete amateur the keys to a fully equipped wood working shop, complete with laser cutters, CNC routers and a load of power tools and letting them have at it with only a few YouTube videos for guidance. Sure they'll be able to make things, and larger and more impressive things than if they could only use hand tools, but the resulting creations will be over engineered, or rickety, or just plain badly designed compared to furniture created by someone who's spent a few years apprenticed to a master craftsman. And you know what, that's fine. 99% of web development is still teenagers desperate to be the next Elon Musk hawking Tinder for marmosets to VCs, WordPress sites and e-commerce. It doesn't matter if it's a bit shit and is developed by people who learned their craft on Udemy and by watching 10 ways to turn yourself into a l33t programmer videos. The concerning thing is when that philosophy starts to infect areas where actual safety critical software engineering is done. No one wants a l33t programmer with massive scrum skillz designing the control system for a nuclear reactor...

blub 5y ago

Such web solutions are cheaper because the software market is really sick. There is almost no point in competing on quality and performance for consumer software, because some start-up with hundreds of millions of VC funding or some SW megacorp will enter the market and give their mediocre product away for free while paying engineers N times more than what you can offer. Bonus points if the software is at least partly open source or integrates with some standard (which will get nixed once they have enough market share). And those VCs and that CEO won't be particularly concerned with technical excellence, they'll focus on their metrics regarding user acquisitions, market share, etc. Since technical excellence is of at best secondary importance, it makes sense to commoditise the technology and make it as easy as possible to build such applications. Build some framework, give it away for free, ideally open source. Brag about how you're enriching the world through your open source contributions. Optionally snicker at the fact that you're in fact controlling how things get built on the so-called open web. Relax on your yacht while drinking a good champagne. Don't explain to the poor sods still worrying their brains about technology why "the economics" prevent building quality software, because you don't give a fuck anyway. One of your employees or the employee of some other web company will surely set aside some time to clarify this, like the good little employee that they are.

CRConrad 5y ago
Horribly cynical... And oh so true. (Because sometimes, reality is horribly cynical.)

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Comment fails to account for user perspective. As a user I do not want Electron nor React. It does not solve a problem for me, it creates a new one.^1 I would rather someone like UNIXSheikh make the "engineering" decisions. 1. I avoid both Electron and React. I like UNIX. Runs on many platforms.

bengale 5y ago
You're in the minority. Companies don't need to appeal to every potential customer, just a large portion of them.

gyulai 5y ago

> hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap But this is the point: Technological development could go in one of two directions: Allow skilled people to build increasingly bigger and better things, or allow increasingly low-skilled people to displace the skilled people by creating things that are worse but still vaguely fit-for-purpose. -- The industry is going the latter path, which is highly offensive to those skilled people.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> Hiring experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive, So it looks like software would vastly improve if silicon valley companies moved to india or russia or some other place with abundant supply of capable developers. Regardless, what you said doesnt show that it was a strawman, it was still a valid conclusion, but you re offering the real reason behind it.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse. True, and the author highlights the benefit himself. Maybe there is an underlying truth here as the number of users isn't indicative of quality and they might be successful if implemented differently. Apps like Teams are a severe resource hog, software is getting slower even if machines improve. I use electron myself for visualization, but I know it is not the optimal choice.

dachryn 5y ago

and thats exactly his problem. Its about dumbifying the development cycle, with often terrible results for the end-user. Its a race to the bottom about 'how low can we go' and 'what will our users tolerate'. Not all Electron apps are bad, but thats because they are still doing a ton of work to actually make it a little bit smoother. But this is in spite of Electron, not thanks to Electron. Its a race to mediocrity on every platform

Jetrel 5y ago

The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's such a staggering, one-sided comparison in "fit and finish", attention to detail, and not having weird little bugs that never get fixed. I say this as a former OS partisan, but even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools", is way behind the curve. Steam, too, is now an electron app. The thing that's just the brutal nail in the coffin is — if it just had the attributes mentioned above, it'd be a huge win. But to have "nearly perfect cross-platform support out of the box with no effort?" Jesus. The thing about electron is — some 5 years from now, we're likely to start shipping electron apps that run on WebASM rather than JS, and at that point, there won't be any valid counterargument. They'll have all the benefits, and run just as fast and lean. Game over.

CRConrad 5y ago
> The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. [...] even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools You've never used Delphi, FP/Lazarus, or even Visual Basic, have you? ___ [Edited to add (equally erroneous) Apple quote.]
gwillz 5y ago
I'd argue that Steam isn't 'now' an electron app but was the OG 'electron' app. The store and community interface have always been web UI from day one. Originally it wrapped the IE/trident engine and then transitioned to chromium.

resonious 5y ago

Indeed. This bit: "... now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse." is actually true and a good thing.

taurusnoises 5y ago

The author isn't "fighting a strawman." It's called venting. The author is venting. It's really quite harmless.

torginus 5y ago

I think the underlying explanation for this is that the world sucks. Most of the companies that are commonly thought of as tech companies aren't. My definition of a tech company is a company that lives and dies by the quality of technology they make. For example Nvidia is a tech company. If someone made GPUs that are half the price, but twice as fast, Nvidia would be out of business in a jiffy. Spotify isn't a tech company - if someone made a better music player, they wouldn't be able to disrupt Spotify, unless they somehow managed to make a deal with every record label under the sun. In the 2000s, I had a 20GB Music folder full of music I liked, and I played them using Winamp, which supported searching my library as fast as I could type. It didn't have all of Spotify's features, but the it did the core value proposition of playing music better than Spotify does today imo. The problem is that Spotify is a package deal - if you like the service, then you must use the client - and they are under no competitive pressure to make a better one. The 'it's much cheaper' argument is ridiculous - it's not that hard to create a native app that plays music - I doubt the people who wrote Winamp commanded the salaries FAANG people writing Electron apps do today. 'Tech' companies make much more money today than when they were making when they were writing native stuff.

tlavoie 5y ago
There are other players that use Spotify's API. For one example, ncspot is a command-line terminal-style program written in Rust with librespot.

jrm4 5y ago

I mean, you named the precious few that don't suck, and two of them do essentially the same thing, and the other is a music player with a very questionable business model. I'm with the op. I'm deeply unimpressed with the last decade or so of software development; and that's not just blowing smoke -- this is day to day practice. With the exception of Discord, I deliberately take pains to use old software because it's better. Moreover, I find when I show non-tech folk "how I do things with old software," most want to learn more, and nearly none are satisfied with what they are "given."