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I think you’re missing the point a little friendo, it’s not that electron is bad it’s that electron itself is an abstraction for cross platform support. If code

I think you’re missing the point a little friendo, it’s not that electron is bad it’s that electron itself is an abstraction for cross platform support. If code can be generated for free then the question is why do we need this to begin with why can’t Claude write it in win32, SwiftUI, and gtk? The answer of course is that it can’t do it and maintain compatibility between all three well enough as it’s high effort and each has its own idiosyncrasies.

linsomniac 8mo ago
I don't know about whether Electron fits in this case, but I can say Claude isn't equally proficient at all toolchains. I recently had Claude Code (Opus 4.6, agent teams) build a image manipulation webapp in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig. In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+. They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.
ozim 8mo ago
To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. To build Swift you have to pay developer fee to Apple, to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. Which both suck. Don’t forget mobile Android you pay to Google. That is why everyone jumped to building in Electron because it is based on web standards that are free and are running on chromium which kind of is tied to Google but you are not tied to Google and don’t have to pay them a fee. You can also easily provide kind of the same experience on mobile skipping Android shenigans.
- mirsadm 8mo ago
  I know Anthropic is burning cash but I'm pretty sure they can afford to pay the developer fees for those platforms.
- diath 8mo ago
  > To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. It's LGPL, all you have to do is link GTK dynamically instead of statically to comply. > to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. You don't.
- FpUser 8mo ago
  >"to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft" Not really, you can self sign but your native application will be met with a system prompt trying to scare user away. This is maddening of course and I wish MS, Apple, whatever others will die just for this thing alone. You fuckers leveraged huge support from developers writing to you platform but not, it is of course not enough for you vultures, now let's rip money from the hands that fed you.

linsomniac 8mo ago

I don't know about whether Electron fits in this case, but I can say Claude isn't equally proficient at all toolchains. I recently had Claude Code (Opus 4.6, agent teams) build a image manipulation webapp in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig. In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+. They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.

ozim 8mo ago

To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. To build Swift you have to pay developer fee to Apple, to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. Which both suck. Don’t forget mobile Android you pay to Google. That is why everyone jumped to building in Electron because it is based on web standards that are free and are running on chromium which kind of is tied to Google but you are not tied to Google and don’t have to pay them a fee. You can also easily provide kind of the same experience on mobile skipping Android shenigans.

mirsadm 8mo ago
I know Anthropic is burning cash but I'm pretty sure they can afford to pay the developer fees for those platforms.
diath 8mo ago
> To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. It's LGPL, all you have to do is link GTK dynamically instead of statically to comply. > to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. You don't.
FpUser 8mo ago
>"to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft" Not really, you can self sign but your native application will be met with a system prompt trying to scare user away. This is maddening of course and I wish MS, Apple, whatever others will die just for this thing alone. You fuckers leveraged huge support from developers writing to you platform but not, it is of course not enough for you vultures, now let's rip money from the hands that fed you.