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Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why some developers using Electron decide to release an non-cross-platform application. Isn't that the purpose of Electron? To create cross-platform applications using web technologies? Otherwise, why not build it with Obj-C or Swift and get advantage of the native libraries?

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Probably because (AFAIK) Electron currently requires you to have each platform to build that platform's release. At least that's what I thought I saw last time I checked?

Also there are subtle differences in platforms which means you actually need to test. Simple examples are menu differences (no app menu on windows). Forking external command line program differences. Application data differences etc. (maybe someone will make the electron cross platform CI tester?)

In our case we are aiming towards making a cross platform application. Before doing so we want to make sure to have a version that we feel confident about and our users like.

Do the native libraries really provide that much? Is it really that hard to implement a scrolling list of images these days, or a toggle button?

Two unrelated questions. Native libraries would — at least — make the application faster, and considering this is an image-related program I don't want to imagine how slow it is being rendered via a hard webview instead of a light one powered by a native framework like Cocoa. On the other hand, if it is difficult to implement an scrolling list of images and a toggle button using either Objc or Swift, that is something I don't know because I have limited experience with those languages, but if you take the time to build a non-cross-platform application, why not use native libraries?

If they are planning to package this program for Windows, Linux, Others then good, nice release, but I would still criticize because they are using a technology that is supposed to be a tool to build cross-platform applications from the beginning, if they already have the HTML / JavaScript code for this, what is stopping them from packaging the Windows version for example? I don't see anything in the feature list that requires Mac specific hardware / tools.

That’s the idea, to bring this cross platform as soon as we have a tool people like. But we do need to use some special tricks, more than Electron provides, to manage the macOS clipboard. I’d expect that we need to do similar tricks when we port it to Windows and Linux. That said, macOS seemed like a good starting platform as it it what we use ourselves.

You have to make a choice if you really absolutely must have everything done "native". Do you really need that performance or can you get away with HTML? For mobile, it's still more important but its perfectly possible to create a fast desktop web app these days.

If you're doing something graphically intensive, there's also always WebGL. At the current rate the browsers are going, I expect the case to do native apps to be shrinking. Stuff is already running at 60 fps in the browser these days and most people can't tell the difference past 60 fps, and the benefit of getting access to the javascript/HTML web ecosystem outweighs any other points for most apps.

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