It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a chat.
Yeah, I know that it's super hard to make native GUI these days, but please if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that.
Examples of good ol' native desktop apps : twitter for OSX.
Comments such as "why didn't you make everything from scratch" probably aren't going to contribute much to the conversation.
Disagreeing with someone isn't the same as shitting on their hard work and good-faith effort to create something useful.
Javascript is probably one of the most common languages, with Node.JS the most common server-side variant of it, allowing so very many people to contribute.
Also, we live in age where we don't have 100MB systems. At the moment the program is using a whole 30MB, which constitutes about 0.4% of my 8GB system.
I also had criticism in time for open source projects I worked on.
It's not about the person who did it, it's about my opinion and why I wouldn't use it.
Kudos for everyone doing open source.
> It's terrible.
It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo.
> if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that
Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.
I care, because it's a waste of resources, I care because I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery, I care because I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core, I care because I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
You know, things Electron doesn't provide.
I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today, and it's not half bad. That doesn't stop software from being absolute crap.
sudo rm -rf /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/hid/usbhid/
and we'll all be better off.
I feel like "want" is a strong word though. I don't exactly believe you've earned any right to get personal information. I'll give you a hint though, it's over 25.
In all seriousness though, when HN lives in a safe space where being told your work is shit isn't accepted, what other answers do I have aside from being snarky? It's okay to be told your work is shit. It's better when you're told why it's shit, sure. But that's not a judgement on you, as a person. It's about your work. It's shit. And it's fine, no hard feelings. Start over, you'll maybe do it better.
Maybe Racket will come to the rescue soon :) it comes with full gui and graphics libraries, is a much saner language, and is performant (with major perf boosts in the works), cross-platform, has c interop... Optional type system...
Also:
> I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery
This is not JS (or Electron) specific.
> I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core
Again, this is not JS (or Electron) specific.
> I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
This is not JS (or Electron) specific either.
> This is not JS (or Electron) specific either.
Pikzen could be more respectful. But to be fair, it is really reeally hard to make animations smooth all the time with web technologies. I have never seen a web app or Electron app being smooth all the time, on all my hardware. Usually there is some amount of stuttering. I mean, come on, we did 60 fps in the 90s, so even hardware from 10 years ago should be able to achieve 60 fps all the time without breaking a sweat. I know there are hardware accelerated CSS animations but for some reason smooth animations remain hard, e.g. because of garbage collector pauses, accidental relayouts or whatever.
Native UIs tend to fare much better. Though to be fairer still, even they fail at delivering smooth animations all the time (but still succeed more often than web tech). For exmaple macOS Sierra has more animation stutterings on my latest Macbook Pro than OS X Lion from 2008.
Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible.
If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.
The less electron-based running apps, the better. The only electron app I (sometimes) use is Atom.
I have switched to slack on browser, instead of the app.