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I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term in the dev-oriented space.
by vovavili 11mo ago
I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term in the dev-oriented space.
- jshen 11mo agoIt's been winning for a while
- wnevets 11mo agoEven if those devs are vibe-oriented?
- verdverm 11mo agowhy? I don't have a problem with it, building extensions for VS Code is pretty easy Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach parity
- scotty79 11mo agoEase of writing and testing extensions is actually the cause why Electron won IDE wars. Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish. Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
- Aurornis 11mo agoComplaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not a practical argument. The people who push these arguments don’t care that it actually runs very well on even below average developer laptops, they think it should have been written in something native.
- verdverm 11mo agosame people pushing rust as "it's just faster" without considering the complexities that exist outside the language that impact performance?
- Dylan16807 11mo agoThe word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare. When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents. And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
- verdverm 11mo agoI regularly run 6+ electron apps on a M2 Air and notice no slowdown 2x as many chrome instances, no issues
- Dylan16807 11mo agoSure, 6 electron apps by themselves will eat some gigabytes and you won't notice the difference. If you didn't have those gigabytes of memory sitting idle, you would notice. Either ugly swapping behaviors or programs just dying. I use all my memory and can't add more, so electron causes me slowdowns regularly. Not constantly, but regularly, mostly when switching tasks.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
- Dylan16807 11mo ago> I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. "Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a blank windows install has more than a hundred processes going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the computer if it was in all of them? > Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to have better computers just to run things like editors. The point of a beefy computer is to do things like compile. But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not developer tools. > The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me often. > You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right? Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set that does need to stay resident for them to be responsive.
- SR2Z 11mo agoElectron apps will win because they're just web apps - and web apps won so decisively years ago that they will never go anywhere.
- troupo 11mo agoNo. Electron apps won, not web apps. There's a huge difference.
- lerp-io 11mo agoelectron is just a wrapper for the browser tho
- scotty79 11mo agoIt funny that despite how terrible, convoluted and maladapted web tech is for displaying complex GUIs it still gradually ate lunch of every native component library and they just couldn't innovate to keep up on any front. Amazon just released OS that uses React Native for all GUI.
- skydhash 11mo agoIt's easy to design bad software and write bad code. Like the old saying: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one". Businesses don't have time to write good and nice software, so they wrote bad one.
- SR2Z 11mo agoIf they have time to write nice software, they generally can only afford to do it once. Lots of Electron apps are great to use.
- throwaway2037 11mo agoWhy do you consider Electron maladapted? It has really reduced the friction to write GUIs in an enterprise environment.
- _harsch 11mo agoits hold the market for over 10 years tho... i wished zed would've not been under gpl
- WD-42 11mo agoWhy not GPL? So we could be seeing closed source proprietary forks by now? How do you think the Zed team would feel about that?
- pjc50 11mo agoWhat other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?
- exasperaited 11mo agoThis is the painful truth, isn't it? IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.) Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good. But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
- asyncze 11mo ago[dead]
- gopher_space 11mo agoGodot looks ok and is surprisingly easy to work with.
- pjc50 11mo agoCould you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
- gopher_space 11mo agoThe Godot editor is written in Godot. The look and feel of the editor is set up to be familiar to people working with 3D, but you're using a 2D* desktop application and all of the parts work responsively. I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.
- nurumaik 11mo agoIf you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all
- whynotminot 11mo agoIt’s kind of a meme to dunk on Electron, but here’s it’s been for years. It’s part of the furniture at this point, for better or worse. Maybe don’t bet on it, but certainly wouldn’t be smart to bet against it, either.
- Miraste 11mo agoVS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
- paulddraper 11mo agoExactly. JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans… VS Code does well with performance. Maybe one of the new ones usurps, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.
- ehnto 11mo agoI have always found JetBrains stuff super snappy. I use neovim as a daily driver but for some projects the inference and debugging integration in JetBrains is more robust.
- skydhash 11mo ago> many non-Electron full IDEs VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for XCode. It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line, saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your pelican case.
- bmitc 11mo ago> VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. No way that is true. In fact, it's the opposite, which is the exact reason I use VS Code.
- skydhash 11mo agoPlease take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes. VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find extensions. But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config. So what you will see are more like meta-extensions. Something that either solve a whole class of problems, could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction model.
- btown 11mo agoI strongly disagree. Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs. Even more importantly, though, the more we move towards "I'm supervising a fleet of 50+ concurrent AI agents developing code on separate branches" the more the notion of the IDE starts to look like something you want to be able to launch in an unconfigured cloud-based environment, where I can send a link to my PM who can open exactly what I'm seeing in a web browser to unblock that PR on the unanswered spec question. Sure, there's a world where everyone in every company uses Zed or similar, all the way up to the C-suite. But it's far more likely that web technologies become the things that break down bottlenecks to AI-speed innovation, and if that's the case, IDEs built with an eye towards being portable to web environments (including their entire extension ecosystems) become unbeatable.
- imiric 11mo ago> Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs. The last thing I want is to install dozens of JS extensions written by people who crossed that lower barrier. Most of them will probably be vibe coded as well. Browser extensions are not the reason I use specific browsers. In fact, I currently have 4 browser extensions installed, one of which I wrote myself. So the idea that JS extensions will be a net benefit for an IDE is the wrong way of looking at it. Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually. There are plenty of editors and IDEs that don't have as many users as the more popular ones, yet still have an enthusiastic and dedicated community around them.
- SR2Z 11mo ago> Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually. The most successful IDE of all time is ed, which is enthusiastically used by one ancient graybeard who is constantly complaining about the kids these days. Nobody has told him that the rest of the world uses 250MB of RAM for their text editor because they value petty things like "usability" over purity. He would have a heart attack - the last time he heard someone describe the concept of Emacs plugins he flew into a rage and tried to organize a death panel for anyone using syntax highlighting.
- Aurornis 11mo agoThe anti-Electron meme is a vocal minority who don’t realize they’re a vocal minority. It’s over represented on Hacker News but outside of HN and other niches, people do not care what’s under the hood. They only care that it works and it’s free. I used Visual Studio Code across a number of machines including my extremely underpowered low-spec test laptop. Honestly it’s fine everywhere. Day to day, I use an Apple Silicon laptop. These are all more than fast enough for a smooth experience in Visual Studio Code. At this point the only people who think Electron is a problem for Visual Studio Code either don’t actually use it (and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about) or they’re obsessing over things like checking the memory usage of apps and being upset that it could be lower in their imaginary perfect world.
- no_wizard 11mo agoWhat’s long term exactly? Between VSCode and previous winners Brackets and Atom Electron has been in this space in the top 5 for 20 years already. I think the ship sailed
- mrweasel 11mo agoI wouldn't bet on Google product for anything long-term.
- TZubiri 11mo agoIt's like those recipes for yogurt. In order to build a web app, you will first need a web app
- alexfromapex 11mo agoCare to explain why? I like Electron but I've switched to Tauri because it feels way faster and more secure.