Building a desktop application with Electron

The problem is more about using webtechs for the UI than the size of the binary. There is a reason why people aren't massively moving from text editors such as Sublime Text to Webtech based editors like atom : performances. But everything is cyclical, we are just still in the "you can do everything with html and js" era. Go,Nim,Rust,Crystal and others are on their way in. They are statically typed, multithreaded, easier than C and C++ , compiled and can be linked to Gtk,Qt and other multiplateform UI toolkits. Javascript everywhere even where it doesn't make sense is on its way out.

> The problem with this is that users have to download a binary of over 40mb just to run a "hello world" app.

Sure, but the overhead is pretty fixed. So yes, if all your app does is say "hello world", then the overhead ends up being 99% of the app. But maybe you shouldn't be making an app for that in the first place? If your application actually does something, and has code, and text, and images, and audio, then the overhead is negligible.

Yeah, that's what put me off of NW.js too. The prebuilt Electron binaries, electron-packager and electron-builder are too good to pass up. That also sounds like a sweet project to learn the ins and outs of Node because you can hack away at a chat app for weeks adding cool features.

That looks pretty cool and I love that there's a ready made gulp file for most of the common tasks. :)

We are doing some larger scale desktop stuff with Ionic right now, and someone from the community wrote about doing something similar: http://www.raymondcamden.com/2015/07/23/some-initial-thought...

It's interesting. Not sure where we'll take it, but I love the idea of one code base running everywhere, including desktop.

One interesting aspect of developing for different platforms came from Facebook's React Team (https://code.facebook.com/posts/1014532261909640/react-nativ...):

"It's worth noting that we're not chasing “write once, run anywhere.” Different platforms have different looks, feels, and capabilities, and as such, we should still be developing discrete apps for each platform, but the same set of engineers should be able to build applications for whatever platform they choose, without needing to learn a fundamentally different set of technologies for each. We call this approach “learn once, write anywhere.”"