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> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well And hopefully kill Electron. I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb a
by rekabis 6mo ago
> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well
And hopefully kill Electron.
I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.
- api 6mo agoThe point is being able to write it once with web developers instead of writing it a minimum of twice (Windows and macOS) with much harder to hire native UI developers.
- aeonfox 6mo agoAnd HTML/CSS/JS are far more powerful for designing than any of SwiftUI/IB on Apple, Jetpack/XML on Android, or WPF/WinUI on Windows, leaving aside that this is what designers, design platforms and AI models already work best with. Even if all the major OSes converged on one solution, it still wouldn't compete on ergonomics or declarative power for designing.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 6mo agoLol SwiftUI/Jetpack/WPF aren’t design tools, they’re for writing native UI code. They’re simply not the right tool for building mockups. I don’t see how design workflows matter in the conversation about cross-platform vs native and RAM efficiency since designers can always write their mockups in HTML/CSS/JS in isolation whenever they like and with any tool of their choice. You could even use purely GUI-based approaches like Figma or Sketch or any photo/vector editor, just tapping buttons and not writing a single line of web frontend code.
- aeonfox 6mo agoWho said anything about mockups? Design goes all the way from concept to real-world. If a designer can specify declaratively how that will look, feel, and animate, that's far better than a developer taking a mockup and trying their hardest to approximate some storyboards. Even as a developer working against mockups, I can move much faster with HTML/CSS than I can with native, and I'm well experienced at both (yes, that includes every tech I mentioned). With native, I either have to compromise on the vision, or I have to spend a long time fighting the system to make it happen (...and even then)
- rimliu 6mo agowell, then you are really bad at native and should not be comparing those technologies despite your claims otherwise (which make little sense).
- aeonfox 6mo ago> really bad at native Yikes. I spent 15 years developing native on both mobile and desktop. If you think that native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS, you're objectively wrong. By design, each operation system limits you to their particular design language, and styling of components is hidden by the API making forward-compatible customisation impossible. There's no escaping that. And if you acknowledge that fact, you can't then claim native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS. If you don't acknowledge that fact, you're unhinged from reality. There's pros and cons to the two approaches, of course. But that's not what's being debated here.
- EraYaN 6mo agoThe real disconnect is that the user doesn't really care all that much. It's mostly the designers who care. And Qt for example but also WPF let you style components almost to unrecognizable and unusable results. So if everyone will need to make do with 8GB for the foreseeable future, designers might just be told "No.", which admittedly will be a big shock to some of them. Or maybe someone finally figures out how to do HTML+CSS in a couple of megabytes.
- aeonfox 6mo ago> the user doesn't really care all that much They do. But not in the way that you think. I recently switched from Spotify (well known Electron-based app) to Apple Music (well known native app). The move was mostly an ethical one, but I must say, the UI functionality and app features are basically poverty in comparison. One tiny example, navigating from playlist entry to artist requires multiple interactions. This is just one of many frustrations I've had with the app. But hey, it has beautiful liquid glass effects! In short: iteration time matters. Times from design to implementation, to internal review, to real user feedback, and back to design from each phase should be as fast as possible. You don't get the same velocity as you do in native. Add to that you have to design and implement in quadruplicate, iOS design for iOS, Android for Android, MacOS for Mac, Windows design for windows. All that is why people use Electon.
- nutjob2 6mo agoYou mean the point is to dump it all on the end user's machine, hogging its resources. It's bad enough having to run one boated browser, now we have to run multiples? This is not the right path.
- eli_gottlieb 6mo agoAs the kids say: skill issue!
- tcfhgj 6mo agoThere is native to the OS and there's native to the machine. Anyways, I'm both cases you don't really have to write it twice. Native to the OS: write only the UI twice, but implement the Core in Rust. Native to the machine: Write it only once, e.g. in iced, and compile it for every Plattform.
- righthand 6mo agoThe point is you can be lazy and write the app in html and js. Then you dont need to write c, even though c syntax is similar to js syntax and most gui apps wont require needing advanced c features if the gui framework is generous enough. Now that everyone who cant be bothered, vibe codes, and electron apps are the overevangelized norm… People will probably not even worry about writing js and electron will be here to stay. The only way out is to evangelize something else. Like how half the websites have giant in your face cookie banners and half have minimalist banners. The experience will still suck for the end user because the dev doesnt care and neither do the business leaders.
- michaelt 6mo agoHonestly C and JavaScript could hardly be more different, as languages. About the only thing they share is curly braces.
- andersmurphy 6mo agoYeah JS is closer to lisp/scheme than C (I say this as someone who writes JS, Clojure and the occasional C).
- david-gpu 6mo agoSyntax ain't the problem. The semantics of C and JS could not be more different.
- righthand 6mo agoBut the point isn’t that they’re more different than alike. The point is that learning c is not really that hard it’s just that corporations don’t want you building apps with a stack they don’t control. If a js dev really wanted to it wouldn’t be a huge uphill climb to code a c app because the syntax and concepts are similar enough.
- dminik 6mo agoWhat "advanced features" are there to speak of in C? What does the syntax of C being similar to JS matter? This comment makes no sense.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoYou do need a couple framebuffers, but for the most part yeah...
- lmm 6mo agoWho cares about 300Mb, where is that going to move the needle for you? And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language then 300Mb is a price more than worth paying. Likewise if the alternative is the app never getting started, or being single-platform-only, because the available build systems suck too bad. There ought to be a short one-liner that anyone can run to get easily installable "binaries" for their PyQt app for all major platforms. But there isn't, you have to dig up some blog post with 3 config files and a 10 argument incantation and follow it (and every blog post has a different one) when you just wanted to spend 10 minutes writing some code to solve your problem (which is how every good program gets started). So we're stuck with Electron.
- tcfhgj 6mo ago> And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language and if not?
- lmm 6mo ago> and if not? If the alternative is memory-safe and easy to build, then maybe people will switch. But until it is it's irresponsible to even try to get them to do so.
- tcfhgj 6mo agoUntil? Just take what's out there - it's so easy to improve on Electron
- lmm 6mo agoLike what? Where else (that's a name brand platform and not, like, some obscure blog post's cobbled-together thing) can I start a project, push one button, and get binaries for all major platforms? Until you solve that people will keep using Electron.
- im3w1l 6mo agoThere are quite a few options. Many of them look dated though. I think that's the usp of electron.
- brikym 6mo agoIt's happening. Cursor 3 moved to rust. A lot of people are using Zed (rust) instead of vscode.
- raydev 6mo agoIt won't be "happening" until Slack, Teams, and Discord leave Electron behind. They are the apps that need to be open 24/7.
- buccal 6mo agoTeams works similarly in browser tab and "natively". Slack was similar if I remember correctly.
- Ray20 6mo agoIt's not entirely clear what the connection is. We're not doing Electron because some popular software also using it. We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.
- mherkender 6mo ago> web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory. May I never have to use or work on your project's software.
- rolymath 6mo ago
- neop1x 6mo agoWon't happen. People are ok with swapping to their SSDs, Macbook Neo confirms that
- veber-alex 6mo agoAs if native apps are any better. Books app on my mac takes 400MB without even having a single book open.
- flykespice 6mo agoI find that an exaggerated claim, have you really checked they aren't using a webview or some other non-native runtime?
- veber-alex 6mo agoI did't but that's exactly my point. Native apps are so poorly optimized that they don't offer any advantage over Electron apps.
- FuckButtons 6mo agoHopefully just kill off the javascript for everything mindset to be honest.