3 ms·

I find it really fascinating how a completely different subset of Hackernews users answers to you than are present on other threads. As literary no sibling is v

I find it really fascinating how a completely different subset of Hackernews users answers to you than are present on other threads. As literary no sibling is voicing a dissenting opinion I feel compelled to present it: Purely from the user perspective I hate electron, because of its RAM usage. The speed argument is a straw man: Of course V8 is fast. And yes, VSCode is a very good IDE. But the problem is real world electron application don't scale down. In my (of course biased) experience even simple electron applications use at least half a gigabyte of RAM, often a whole gigabyte. If you're on a beefy 32gb machine you'll never noticed the difference. But on the 8gb machines most people around me use, these electron apps really take up a huge fraction of RAM. And swapping is definitely noticeable slow, even on SSDs. The "think about the planet" argument comes to play, when I need to upgrade my PC because RAM is the bottleneck. And seriously what fraction of the population even has the knowledge to only upgrade the RAM and not buy a whole new PC. If I had to advise you personally, I might even tell you to choose electron. But be aware that you are using the "defect" option in the prisoner's dilemma: as everybody around you is choosing the societally harmful option of wasting resources you are at a competitive disadvantage to do the right thing. And also: electron has stolen mind share off of better solutions, so the documentation there is also not in the best place. And even worse, those people I reach with my argument, and thus put at a competitive disadvantage because they are going the extra mile to do the rights thing, might be those that I want to support the most, because they might be willing to the right (IMO) things at other topics I value as well, like the importance of privacy. So what is the conclusion? I have no idea how to fix our collective resource waste and it is hard to assign individual responsibility and I'm deeply dissatisfied by the whole situation.

cercatrova 4y ago
> I find it really fascinating how a completely different subset of Hackernews users answers to you than are present on other threads. As literary no sibling is voicing a dissenting opinion I suspect the difference is because they are responding from a developer's mindset, not a user's. For devs, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps, especially if one already has web experience. Users who dislike Electron are generally seen as a vocal minority (how many people use Slack or VSCode vs non-Electron variants?). But then you have this vocal minority congregating on HN, which is especially focused on speed, and you get comments like the parent linked, dismissing Electron. The dev point of view is more prevalent in this thread because the linked article is all about how a dev failed to ship an app because they thought it wasn't good enough, which is exactly the problem Electron solves, even if it's worse for the user.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > For devs, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps For developers who have never heard of Visual Basic, Delphi, or Free Pascal / Lazarus, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps they know of. There, FTFY.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    I'm gonna be honest, vanishingly few people use any of those technologies these days, and I'm speaking as someone who has used VB and some Delphi before. Electron and JS has magnitudes more libraries and support than all three of those technologies combined. To think that devs these days should use any of them is to be tone deaf to how the tech world works these days. Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps.
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      > Electron and JS has magnitudes more libraries and support than all three of those technologies combined. Libraries and support for what? Betcha 99 percent are for stuff that 99 percent of developers don't need. > Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps. Wasn't this a discussion about the single bloke working on his Minimum Maybe Viable Product? He's his own boss. And if he doesn't want to be convinced to use the best tools for that -- his problem, not mine. I was just correcting your factual error about the easiest way to make desktop apps.
      - mwcampbell 4y ago
        As it happens, the deciding factor in my choice to use Electron in this particular product is that, thanks to being built on Chromium, Electron includes high-level WebRTC APIs with a complete media stack (including advanced stuff like audio streams from multiple sources). Good luck getting that working in Delphi or Free Pascal.
        4y ago
datagram 4y ago
> So what is the conclusion? I have no idea how to fix our collective resource waste and it is hard to assign individual responsibility and I'm deeply dissatisfied by the whole situation. I think the most likely conclusion is that once OSes are guaranteed to have a modern-enough browser engine (this is close to being true for Windows since they introduced WebView2), Electron could update their framework to use the system's native webview (or at least make it available as an option for the developer). This would bring back the problem of having to test in multiple browsers, but I'd rather test against an old version of Chromium, or even Safari, than have to test against the old Edge engine in WebView1. Edit: Did some more reading, and the way Electron discusses WebView2 doesn't seem to imply that they're interested in integrating with it: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2 https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2 But regardless, I think all it would take is someone else making a framework that uses native webviews and implements enough of Electron's APIs/tooling to be close to a drop-in replacement. (Then again, how many people are using Preact?)

cercatrova 4y ago

> I find it really fascinating how a completely different subset of Hackernews users answers to you than are present on other threads. As literary no sibling is voicing a dissenting opinion I suspect the difference is because they are responding from a developer's mindset, not a user's. For devs, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps, especially if one already has web experience. Users who dislike Electron are generally seen as a vocal minority (how many people use Slack or VSCode vs non-Electron variants?). But then you have this vocal minority congregating on HN, which is especially focused on speed, and you get comments like the parent linked, dismissing Electron. The dev point of view is more prevalent in this thread because the linked article is all about how a dev failed to ship an app because they thought it wasn't good enough, which is exactly the problem Electron solves, even if it's worse for the user.

CRConrad 4y ago
> For devs, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps For developers who have never heard of Visual Basic, Delphi, or Free Pascal / Lazarus, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps they know of. There, FTFY.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  I'm gonna be honest, vanishingly few people use any of those technologies these days, and I'm speaking as someone who has used VB and some Delphi before. Electron and JS has magnitudes more libraries and support than all three of those technologies combined. To think that devs these days should use any of them is to be tone deaf to how the tech world works these days. Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > Electron and JS has magnitudes more libraries and support than all three of those technologies combined. Libraries and support for what? Betcha 99 percent are for stuff that 99 percent of developers don't need. > Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps. Wasn't this a discussion about the single bloke working on his Minimum Maybe Viable Product? He's his own boss. And if he doesn't want to be convinced to use the best tools for that -- his problem, not mine. I was just correcting your factual error about the easiest way to make desktop apps.
    - mwcampbell 4y ago
      As it happens, the deciding factor in my choice to use Electron in this particular product is that, thanks to being built on Chromium, Electron includes high-level WebRTC APIs with a complete media stack (including advanced stuff like audio streams from multiple sources). Good luck getting that working in Delphi or Free Pascal.
      - 4y ago

datagram 4y ago

> So what is the conclusion? I have no idea how to fix our collective resource waste and it is hard to assign individual responsibility and I'm deeply dissatisfied by the whole situation. I think the most likely conclusion is that once OSes are guaranteed to have a modern-enough browser engine (this is close to being true for Windows since they introduced WebView2), Electron could update their framework to use the system's native webview (or at least make it available as an option for the developer). This would bring back the problem of having to test in multiple browsers, but I'd rather test against an old version of Chromium, or even Safari, than have to test against the old Edge engine in WebView1. Edit: Did some more reading, and the way Electron discusses WebView2 doesn't seem to imply that they're interested in integrating with it: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2 https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2 But regardless, I think all it would take is someone else making a framework that uses native webviews and implements enough of Electron's APIs/tooling to be close to a drop-in replacement. (Then again, how many people are using Preact?)