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Comment by crudbug | Hacker News Reader

True, I feel electron stack is like a cancer for native apps.

It's a false dichotomy. The people who use electron are generally not people who know Qt. So the choice isn't app in electron vs app in qt but app in electron vs no app at all.

It depends. Obviously if you're an experienced front end web developer then Electron is an easy choice, and the benefits of using your existing knowledge probably outweighs the speed/resource benefits of a native app, especially for something simple.

A lot of people think Electron is easy to use for everyone though. I fell into this trap last year, I've been doing HTML/CSS since I was in school, and I'm comfortable enough in JS. But once things started getting complex with my project, I realised I was going to need to use some of the bigger frameworks that I'm not familiar with. I started trying to build something with React, Redux, and all the various things that go with it, got overwhelmed, and gave up.

I've recently gone back to the original idea I had, and started from scratch in Qt, with no knowledge of it. It was a bit of a learning curve at the start, but overall the learning experience has been a lot easier than trying to learn the entire current JavaScript ecosystem.

I would say Electron is a good choice for JS experts or simple programs, but otherwise I'd recommend at least giving Qt a try.

if it's a simple program, why would you want to include a few hundred megabytes of dependencies? Seems like a good opportunity to learn something better.

To be fair:

"I had never coded Qt nor C++ until I started Iaitō, ..."

The fact that the author even knows about radare let alone put quite a bit of effort into building a ui for it suggests that he's no stranger to lower level programming tho.

But the code is definitely slanted towards a C style, not C++, and they are very different languages. (He prefers C strings vs C++ strings, for example).

I haven't looked at his code, but why would he use either if he's using Qt? Qt has its own QString class that's far superior to C++'s native strings.

QML should be a relatively easy pickup for JS/HTML devs.

https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-appstudio-samples/wiki/Unders...

Exactly, the people who use electron are obviously not capable of learning QT, and therefore can't make apps if they aren't using Electron. /s

I feel that `/s` usually should be included at the beginning of the statement. Could save some momentary triggers.

On the other hand, the people who use electron are generally people who should be using Qt.

20 years ago people said the same thing about Java applets opening the web to hordes of developers without HTML experience. Doesn't make the result good.

I felt the same after first encountering an app built with electron. The apps made with electron never felt native and just felt like they were another 'chrome apps'. Atom Editor never felt native prior to knowing anything about Electron.

At a certain level of complexity most apps cease to feel native. The interfaces of iTunes and Xcode don't feel very native...

But with that said, the fact that Blender launches instantaneously on my machine and that I can time Atom's launch with a wall clock is kind of silly.

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