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Exactly. People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because

Exactly. People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens. VSCode works because they chose Electron for the advantages that web tech has when it comes to building a plugin ecosystem. They were then willing to put in the effort to make performance decent.

integricho 3y ago
I think it's very subjective what is considered performant. I for one don't think about VSCode as a performant app, for me it is a resource hog, not at all that responsive app, there's always a slight delay / lag in input reaction, simply not a fast application.
- lolinder 3y ago
  So that the rest of us can calibrate, what text editors do you use that you consider to be performant?
  - allan_s 3y ago
    Sublime text or neovim for me (even with all debugger, language server, tabnine etc installed so to be also a full 2024 ide )
  - integricho 3y ago
    SublimeText, Notepad++, CudaText and LiteXL have acceptable performance, memory footprint and responsiveness for my taste (but this is certainly not a benchmark, just another subjective viewpoint :) )
  - trealira 3y ago
    Lite XL, although I usually use Emacs
z3phyr 3y ago
VSCode is slow as heck and a needless memory hog. Something like VS6.0 or Code Warrior with crisper fonts would be my first choice on a graphical interface.
Gormo 3y ago
> People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens. Which amounts to a strong argument in favor of using a tech stack that has superior default performance, and therefore requires less dev effort for optimization.
- whstl 3y ago
  The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Sure Godot can be ok for trivial apps, but extracting performance out of Electron is also not that difficult for trivial apps in the first place.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    > The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Why? What capabilities does Electron provide that Godot doesn’t and can’t? I’m genuinely asking. I don’t know.
    - homarp 3y ago
      Electron allows you can do webdev stuff, so you don't need custom knowledge of anything special. That's the 'superiority'. Doing UI in Godot means either their pythonish custom language or C# (and via GDExtension technology, C and C++ ).
    - whstl 3y ago
      Electron has literally thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by the OS, plus thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by a browser engine. Godot has barely nothing compared to that, as it's not an UI toolkit and never tried to be. Even basic things like "rendering text correctly in multiple languages, with emojis, while making it selectable with the mouse or with the keyboard" are super hard to get right, but it's a problem already solved by your OS, in a way that is not only better optimized and has less unseen bugs than a hypothetical bespoke implementation: it also looks and feels more familiar. Then there's the whole accessibility part, which has different native APIs depending on the OS. Some other people have written detailed answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954087 EDIT: You asked "doesn't and can't". Here's something: there is no can't if you have a turing complete language. But you need a large team to re-do it from scratch, as you're throwing away 40 years of work.
pjmlp 3y ago
VSCode works, because Microsoft has written a ton of C++, C# and Rust code to make it work in a usable manner. Exactly what most devs reaching out to Electron don't want to do, only cozy JavaScript.

integricho 3y ago

I think it's very subjective what is considered performant. I for one don't think about VSCode as a performant app, for me it is a resource hog, not at all that responsive app, there's always a slight delay / lag in input reaction, simply not a fast application.

lolinder 3y ago
So that the rest of us can calibrate, what text editors do you use that you consider to be performant?
- allan_s 3y ago
  Sublime text or neovim for me (even with all debugger, language server, tabnine etc installed so to be also a full 2024 ide )
- integricho 3y ago
  SublimeText, Notepad++, CudaText and LiteXL have acceptable performance, memory footprint and responsiveness for my taste (but this is certainly not a benchmark, just another subjective viewpoint :) )
- trealira 3y ago
  Lite XL, although I usually use Emacs

z3phyr 3y ago

VSCode is slow as heck and a needless memory hog. Something like VS6.0 or Code Warrior with crisper fonts would be my first choice on a graphical interface.

Gormo 3y ago

> People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens. Which amounts to a strong argument in favor of using a tech stack that has superior default performance, and therefore requires less dev effort for optimization.

whstl 3y ago
The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Sure Godot can be ok for trivial apps, but extracting performance out of Electron is also not that difficult for trivial apps in the first place.
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  > The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Why? What capabilities does Electron provide that Godot doesn’t and can’t? I’m genuinely asking. I don’t know.
  - homarp 3y ago
    Electron allows you can do webdev stuff, so you don't need custom knowledge of anything special. That's the 'superiority'. Doing UI in Godot means either their pythonish custom language or C# (and via GDExtension technology, C and C++ ).
  - whstl 3y ago
    Electron has literally thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by the OS, plus thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by a browser engine. Godot has barely nothing compared to that, as it's not an UI toolkit and never tried to be. Even basic things like "rendering text correctly in multiple languages, with emojis, while making it selectable with the mouse or with the keyboard" are super hard to get right, but it's a problem already solved by your OS, in a way that is not only better optimized and has less unseen bugs than a hypothetical bespoke implementation: it also looks and feels more familiar. Then there's the whole accessibility part, which has different native APIs depending on the OS. Some other people have written detailed answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954087 EDIT: You asked "doesn't and can't". Here's something: there is no can't if you have a turing complete language. But you need a large team to re-do it from scratch, as you're throwing away 40 years of work.

pjmlp 3y ago

VSCode works, because Microsoft has written a ton of C++, C# and Rust code to make it work in a usable manner. Exactly what most devs reaching out to Electron don't want to do, only cozy JavaScript.