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> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development s
by vdnkh 4y ago
> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w
And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
- skohan 4y agoYeah but that's not the whole picture - it's not just FOSS choosing Electron so much as platform holders being hostile to cross-platform development. For instance, if Apple had actually kept pace with OpenGL standards, and had embraced Vulkan, it would have been fairly straightforward to to build a native GUI framework which works across platforms. Electron won because all the platform owners basically had to embrace the implementation of web standards on their platforms. So they couldn't prevent those tools from being used to deploy local software as well.
- matthewmacleod 4y agoThe absence of Vulkan on Apple platforms—something that it’s worth noting was developed after Apple’s Metal equivalent—is in absolutely no way even approaching a barrier to building a “native GUI framework”. There literally are cross-platform native GUI frameworks. Even Electron itself is a third-party implementation of a GUI framework - it doesn’t use the platform’s web tech implementation and bundles its own.
- skohan 4y agoIt's just one example of an impediment. If all the major platforms used a consistent standards-based graphics API, you could have one implementation of the drawing layer shared between all platforms. All these little wedges add up.
- toyg 4y agoIt wasn't FOSS that settled on Electron - it was businesses and corporations. Decisions were taken with an eye to balance sheets and P&L reports; Electron remains the cheapest option of them all, because the supply of moderately-skilled HTML/JS labor is naturally larger than for any other language - all thanks to choices the Netscape Corporation made in 1995, when they needed interactivity in their product and they needed it quick.
- Drew_ 4y agoBusinesses and corporations are part of FOSS. The majority of FOSS doesn't exist without them.
- redavni 4y agoIndeed. Imagine a world where everything had to be deployed to the JVM and all progress depended on Sun/Oracle. Or god help us, IE/VBScript.
- pessimizer 4y agoElectron piggybacked on the established (and enforced) open standards of the web to make up for a fragmented proprietary mess of software standards.