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Comment by positivecomment | Hacker News Reader

They could have used Electron or Qt and supported all platforms. Also, why not offer a trial version?

Handling and manipulating data in an obfuscated web environment (Electron) is not fun. Native will undoubtedly offer better memory handling and performance.

Why do you consider electron to be an "obfuscated" web environment? I would argue that electron provides you with much better control than you'd get in a traditional web environment/browser.

> Native will undoubtedly offer better memory handling and performance.

True, but that seems to be a tradeoff that people are ready to make these days. For a lot of organizations, it is just too convenient to build cross-platform desktop apps using the web development skillset.

Although I must admit that, as a React Native contributor, I hoped for something like RN to take off on desktops in addition to mobile. It would provide far more control over the performance than electron because you'd be able to write native code alongside your JS, avoid overhead of the DOM and CSS, and even tune the JS VM for your application.

Then use Qt, which is native and cross-platform.

I find qt on mac to be really unpleasant.

On the other hand, I'm thrilled to see people doing direct native and not Electron, which is slow and resource-intensive.

You've expressed my exact sentiment. This really should be platform agnostic.

Elsewhere the (singlehanded) author explains his reliance upon Mac frameworks and his lack of resources necessary to develop on other platforms. I believe every tradesman has a right to choose his preferred tools and platforms to support.

While I agree that, "every tradesman has a right to choose his preferred tools and platforms to support," that attitude is hard kept if you're selling closed source software for a platform with only five percent market share.

Quite amusingly, about four or five days ago a similar program (Tad, ”a tabular data viewer”) was presented on HackerNews, and if I remember correctly the top-ranking comment was a complaint about it being an Electron app. Ironically it seems nigh impossible to satisfy both camps.

There are a myriad of options available to gain platform agnosticism and nowhere did I, or even the original commentator, state that Electron was the only viable path.

Ironically, you should read the comments from your own example as they descend into debate regarding these very options:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453252

And what's really amusing is that you've now missed this point twice in a two day period.

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