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Comment by pikzen | Hacker News Reader

>1. Electron. Simply awesome - I copied 90 % of my app, changed Sequelize ORM to have it's storage to sqlite and boom. I have a webapp as a OS-packaged app.

And your users get to enjoy awful performance and insane resource usage for their app. How generous of you.

Also, the hate for NodeJS is because Javascript is a terrible language, no matter how many things you put on it (TypeScript, Babel, etc.). It's also because V8 performance is laughable.

Everything you mentioned is also mentioned in http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/751 , which I believe does a nice job of explaining why NodeJS is terrible.

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I usually answer "Javascript is bad" statements with "English is not the most declarative language too, but ... it's the most common". Anyway I think JS is not a part of my statement, so I'm not going to agree on why JS sucks. It's opinionated. And contrary to logic it works good when you get used to it.

About Electron. I think nobody will build Photoshop or 3D Games ( at this point ) using it as a platform. I would personally decline if I have an assignment like this. But for apps like Slack, Visual Studio Code, Atom, etc, it works pretty good. Something more. I'm actually working on my own accounting app that suits my needs, which I would not be able to do for that limited spare-time I have these days If I used Objective-C / Swift.

>But for apps like Slack, Visual Studio Code, Atom, etc, it works pretty good.

I won't get into a long rant, but aside from on OSX, Slack and Atom are slow, resource hogging and unstable piles of crap. Atom couples that with bad architecture and engineering choice, but that's not Electron's fault.

(Also, your comparison with English is bad. English naturally evolved to the state it is in today. Javascript was designed from scratch, and it still manages to be awful. Also, sorry, Javascript isn't the most common language, thankfully.)

> Atom couples that with bad architecture and engineering choice

How? (Other than choosing HTML and JS in the first place)

> I won't get into a long rant, but aside from on OSX

Ah, so they're better on OSX? On Windows 7 all the slack.exe processes are currently using 780MB RAM in total, and I'm only signed into 3 Slack communities.

Shocking!

I have an i7 desktop with 32gb of ram.. a recent rMBP i7/16gb-ram for my personal labtop, and another work issued one... I also use VMs with Linux frequently... VS Code is one of the better code editors I've used. Given, I'm on fast machines with plenty of ram... I really haven't had a serious problem with it... hell, my browser typically uses up way more ram than any other single application on my computer... it still does the job well enough...

That's the key right there "Well enough"...

>Slack and Atom are slow, resource hogging and unstable piles of crap

Atom is my primary editor and I am extremely satisfied with it. Your self-righteous arrogant attitude is strange and has nothing to do with objective, rational criticism.

> It's also because V8 performance is laughable.

Compared to what? Objective-C? Dalvik? (JavaScript VMs generally achieve better performance than those for systematic reasons.)

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