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Yeah 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 insta
by skohan 4y ago
Yeah 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.