Electron 2.0.0 beta
electronjs.org
electronjs.org
It works, it's beautiful, it's easy to use, and unlike many people here, I believe the HTML/CSS/TypeScript/React is rock solid and the closest thing to THE solution to the UI problem.
Of course there are some poor implementations (Slack) and some really good one's (VSCode). Criticism of the platform for the deficiencies of an implementation feels a bit lazy.
Not by a long shot. It's one of the worst things to happen on the desktop, because people who would have built a proper desktop application just wrap their web app in Electron instead.
It's particularly bad for the Linux desktop, where people are used to small binaries that use the system-wide Qt or GTK so they load fast, and use little RAM.
Precisely, people will just use something else. The proliferation of Electron apps splits the user base, so there's less incentive to develop a proper desktop application.
There's no consistency between the dozen "toolkits", each one with its own way of doing things and a lack of interoperability. If you ever had to work with X11's concepts of drag'n'drop, windows, input etc. you probably know what I'm talking about. Dozens of toolkits, few of them talk to each other. It's a mess. Electron just works.
People who would have built a proper desktop application simply don't because the tooling, the environments, the standards (and lack thereof) are awful.
The whole concept of "toolkits" is what makes the situation a complete mess.
Unless you have a good reason (in which case, you'll know), you can just ignore everything other that Qt and GTK.
Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome if we could compromise on any given toolkit, but do you honestly see any of them waving the white flag?
Meanwhile, on Windows for example, there's a standard way to write GUI apps, standardized, well-known and consistent APIs to deal with GDI's toolkit etc. It's awful to write GTK apps just as it's painful to write in pure WINAPI GDI, but GDI has the advantage of being the default, so that "native look" is consistent across most applications since the 3.1 days.
Then comes the community: we have 20+ years of GUI programming happening on Windows, most people simply stick to GDI + self-made custom controls. The outcome is a huge knowledge base that helps get anything and everything done on Windows. Here in the UNIX world over the same time period the GUI developers are spread among different toolkits, so we have many "ok" people in a dozen toolkits and few experts on each one.
Qt is LGPL. So long as you dynamically link to Qt, it doesn't matter what license your app is under. If you don't dynamically link, you lose the integration benefits anyway, so there's no downside, really (Qt is backwards compatible within each major release, so just build against the earliest version of Qt 5 your app works with).
> GDI has the advantage of being the default, so that "native look" is consistent across most applications since the 3.1 days
History means we have two defaults on Linux: Qt and GTK. Qt integrates well in a GTK desktop though, so you can just use Qt.
No doubt it will be years before everything moves over, but at this point Qt is the clear winner: it's always looked better, its licensing issues are now solved, it's the only option that has remotely decent bindings for a remotely decent language. A month or so ago there was a new release of Wx and the comments here were universally "that still exists?"; GTK will go the same way.
There are other options, there are people who really like those options, but Qt has the momentum and has the knowledge base. Just use Qt and you'll be fine, or at least you'll be no less fine that you were with GDI on windows.
Just use Qt.. or GTK. They work and aren't difficult to use. Qt stuff works nicely on windows as well.
Yes, I agree, Qt just works. My initial point was and still is about interoperability. They don't all speak well with each other and there are many good, useful applications in toolkits other than Qt or GTK.
We're talking about proper toolkits vs. Electron here. Good luck making Electron look native, yet alone "talk" with anything :P
With Qt I can use the clipboard, sockets, and so on, set an icon for the application. Linux applications have standards to follow, as long as they do they look the same to the desktop environment.
Are electron apps magically able to speak with other electron apps, in a simpler way (to implement) than Qt applications? I don't think so.
Orrrrrrrr - JavaScript/Typescript with the amazing Chrome debugger and get my work done in half the time?
You’re really really not selling Qt at all, least of all to people who might have NodeJS (lots of those) experience and want to get something done quickly.
Yes I’m also aware of Qt’s 200 language bindings and funnily enough, a lot of shitty, slow, crash Qt apps on my Ubuntu desktop are Python with the PyQT bindings. Because even those guys want to get their job done quick.
So, basically - Electron seems like a really nice default choice.
So much like Electron then?
Use Qt, use Python, and get on with your life. Or use Electron if you prefer, that's fine too. But don't make out like it's the only reasonable option and everything else is too confusing. If you ask 10 developers the right way to do a simple GUI application on Linux, 9 of them will tell you: do it with Qt and Python.
No need to use their smart pointers either, I certainly never have. Never saw any reason to since C++11.
No issue at all mixing with C++11+.
Frankly this is a complete bullshit argument. Qt in particular can be used with little to no code change across the platforms.
And some of the most successful programs on Windows have basically gone their own way in terms of look and feel.
You can't, for example, simply fire Spy++ and check what a given widget is doing, as you can with GDI. The lack of a basic widget building block in X11 makes each one implement the very basics their own different way. And when they need to talk to each other, it's at the very least an unpleasant ordeal.
I much prefer the ability to running a slightly inefficient program over not having that program at all.
Except no-one would have built clients for the linux desktop. Go back before Electron and count how many official clients for Linux there were from major software vendors, hell I'll even take massively feature incomplete answers like "Skype" just to help you.
One notable example is Skype: their Linux client sucked so much it was unusable until their Electron version made the Linux version just as good and modern-looking as the rest.
It is a huge productivity boost for programmers at the expense of making computers slow. On my work computer I am used to run many apps, and with each Electron app added I feel it slowing down. (latest one to switch was Skype for me). What is the point of having such powerful computers when they feel like slugs crawling through a bog?
It's a productivity boost for web developers, who don't have to learn a new language, and for companies that can hire cheap web developers instead of more expensive desktop developers. It's not a productivity boost for someone who knows (or is willing to learn) .NET or Qt.
Unlucky for me, my admins refuse to enable the bridges and also won't grant me an API key for use with the weechat slack plugin.
I hate Slack so much. Slow and miserable and unconfigurable and just crashes at least once a month.
This is even more true for resource-limited open source projects, as cross-platform gui-based ones are difficult to get right, but Electron makes that easier.
That’s a straw man argument. The parent said that Linux development might not be worth the cost. They didn’t say anything about the ability to pay.
«Team, M$ killed Skype for linux, I cannot use it anymore, let switch to something else, like Slack.»
And now Mac users get the same terrible Electron app. The problem is that companies are not just making Electron apps for Linux users. They are replacing native well-integrated Mac and Windows applications by Electron apps (Skype) or do not consider writing native apps (Slack).
So, we had nicely integrated applications with Automator workflows, consistent shortcuts, consistent look and consistent feel. And we are replacing them by things that do not fit into the platform at all. No thanks.
But to be honest, I'd rather have no GUI app on Mac/Linux at all than have it basically be a requirement to waste resources on Slack or whatever other crap and to have developer energy tied up in an editor as shitty as Atom.
It's only 90 KB (!)
Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.
In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.
Basically I'm fine with Electron apps but I have yet to find one that I need and can't be replaced by a browser tab.
To be honest though, since my VS Code instance is sitting at ~500 MB (all processes together) and 0%, I'd wager it's not actually Electron itself that's at fault. It probably is incredibly inefficient compared to pure native code, and probably makes it easy to write inefficient code, but still, that's quite heavy usage you're referring to.
Another commentor in this thread wrote that VS Code is incredible efficient for a Electron app.
VS Code certainly is efficient for an Electron app, and I'm sure it's really hard to achieve that level of efficiency. To be honest though, I use it side by side with Visual Studio itself, and on many metrics, it eats its big brother for breakfast (e.g. [1])... and that is a native app. One can argue that it's apples and oranges, and that the two are not equivalent, but we have an interesting counterpoint. While I'm sure performance is heavily weighted in favour of native, it seems like it's certainly surmountable.
[1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?...
Compare VSCode or Atom with Emacs or Gvim for something more native.
To pick some apps off my desktop right now:
- Emacs with a pile of extensions, 22 MB
- SpeedCrunch, 13 MB
- SumatraPDF, 19 MB
- MS Word, 101 MB
The native libraries had decades to fix this mess, yet they're still by and large the same as decades ago. Will not miss them.
You do not understand what a productivity boost is if you think learning a totally new language and framework is a better choice than using the tools already available.
But also if your logic were correct, we'd all still be writing C.
There was already the problem of them using massively more powerful hardware than their customers, in particular in the consumer segment, but now more and more they seem to not even understand what a "computer" by the looks of it.
With "cloud services" they do not need to think about the servers sitting in racks doing the computing.
And with Electron, this kind of mental distance is making its way onto the desktop.
I was once really into frontend web dev, and learned JS/HTML/CSS. Then I realized it mostly sucked, and went to school for EE. Now I get more upset than anyone I know about Electron apps.
It only takes one counter example.
Can't I just as easily say that the JS/HTML/CSS people are the ones refusing to learn a new ecosystem?
Okay, maybe you have to use Slack or Discord at work.
Life and engineering are about trade-offs. That people use Electron apps despite the downsides just shows that these apps are delivering value to the world. Value that might not have existed had Electron not made it that much easier for people to get into desktop software.
The complaining on HN reminds me of how my users get mad at me for not spending more of my free time developing the forum software. Like I'm trying to spite them. As if I just need to pull some knobs and levels.
What's happening is that software is getting more and more accessible to people. Beginners are making games in Unity and iOS. Cultural channels into tech like Twitch and cryptocurrencies have been opening up. I watch my cousins' children open up the browser's console to delete annoying DOM nodes.
What I suspect is that more and more people are getting into tech, so there are more and more people for you to disagree with about trade-offs.
I really like Git Kraken, in theory, but if I imagine it as a native app it would be so much better.
I see the appeal of Electron, and to be fair we also use it at work. However our application is destined to be running on a dedicated hardware which runs it and nothing else.
Ultimately I'd like to see products like Slack starting with an Electron app and when the means permit it migrate to a native application. Not the other way around.
Having a web app + native app means a huge leap in cost.
Having no web app + native app means a huge loss in user reach.
The only viable replacement would be something like Electron but with a stripped down browser fit to purpose instead of the huge surface-area of Chrome.
https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows
and http://reactdesktop.js.org/
The Windows one is from Microsoft, but is single platform. Nothing officially supported by react devs as far as I can tell.
Electron is not a sensible trade off. It is not necessary to accept that level of inefficiency to get that productivity boost. It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform desktop apps for a long time.
And we end up with a ridiculous Frankenstein solution that is fractally wrong. But it is "Easy" because 90% of programmers are used to HTML,CSS,Javascript and so they can suddenly make 'desktop' apps now.
And no, we don't have a choice when almost every desktop application being made now is being made in electron. Its just awful, and you should quit dismissing the people telling you how much they hate the situation, its real.
And of course those of us that hate it should be aiming to help fix the situation, but of course it is difficult, since anything you propose that is not HTML/CSS/Javascript seems alien to so many modern programmers that they reject it out of hand.
(I use native in quotation marks because we can probably not even agree on what that is.)
This attitude seems to be common here but everyone hating on electron seems to ignore any positive aspects of it and only focuses on the fact that it is slower and/or more resource intensive then had it been written in <native-language-of-choice>.
You can dislike Electron on a technical or principal level, that's fair, but until there is an alternative that would be considered better by most things will simply not change.
Until then, repeating the negatives over and over again only serves to de-value the efforts of those actually producing and shipping code and the only possible outcome is another "tabs vs spaces" holy war.
Generic reactions to negativity, saying there are two sides to every coin, do not really contribute to the discussion, IMO, so I disagree.
While there is an ongoing trend to move towards web apps, I think you are mixing up the causality here a little bit. The main reason why developers are increasingly choosing to move towards web technologies for UI is the sheer pain of doing any kind of cross-platform development on the desktop.
Most of the nice desktop development frameworks (like the ones in C# or Swift) are not cross platform. Meanwhile, we have a decent cross-platform UI framework in Qt, but this requires dealing with C++, which doesn’t even have a good package manager behind it. You could also use GTK+, wxWidgets, FLTK, but these don’t provide a good look and feel and non-Linux OSes.
Basically if you want to easy-to-use cross-platform desktop UI development, your choices boil down to Electron, and maybe pyQt.
Desktop developers have years to make this a better situation by perhaps promoting cross-platform UI standards or building better tooling, but nothing good has really gained much traction, so more developers are justifiably moving to Electron for now.
We are already a decade into neglecting native app technologies in favor of web app technologies, because web apps were much easier to write and deliver than cross-platform native apps (and largely still are). It’s to the point where even big companies with lots of resources are hiring web programmers and web designers to build their UIs.
It’s interesting to me that mobile changes the trade-offs. The quality gulf between web and native apps is greater. The web sucks more on mobile, and expectations for native apps (animations, touch, etc) are higher. Mobile OSes also make it much easier for users to install and manage native apps than it is on desktop (because of the app store, no custom installers, no users locked out of installing apps by their employers as far as I know). I’m excited about React Native for addressing the cross-platform part.
We’ve learned since Java that even if you don’t have “write once, run anywhere,” you can still have “learn once, write anywhere,” a la React. Also, we expect apps to come with their own systems of UI widgets these days, not necessarily “native look and feel.” It really changes the game.
Wx is using native widgets on every platform.
at one point I don't care about multilayer super cute guis
btw turbo pascal had shadowed windows in TUI
Everything about the thing felt 1990s... in the best way. The IDE was clearly designed not for initial discovery by a novice, but for someone who they ultimately expect to become proficient and thus able to capitalize on the expert-friendly UI.
The reasulting binary felt like the 1990s too: A single small executable with instant load times :-)
There is also a more hidden problem, which is that Electron app developers often come from a web background, which is a field with little concern for proper resource management and performance. If a webpage has a memory leak, just refresh it. If it takes too much memory, some other inactive tabs will get killed and be refreshed. VS Code is a good example of an Electron application made by people who are concerned by performance. However, developing a performant application using Electron seems to be harder than actually doing it in another language/framework.
There's a world in which Electron (or rather, "web views as apps") don't exist and Slack is native. Though perhaps it wouldn't have ever happened.
I feel like _many_ of the big apps simply wouldn't have existed in the old model. Native app development has become extremely niche, and each OS has its own quirks. And on the other side of the fence, stuff like Salesforce exist in the browser pretty well.
It's hard to get the causal arrows right on this. But I bet if React Native-style solutions can work well, people would be willing to put in the effort to use it. But so long as the web stack is easier for developers, that'll be where the MVPs get made IMO.
Is it really easier for developers, or do people learn web development first, so it's easier to use the same skills on the desktop than learn new ones?
If find it hard to believe React etc. are easier than .Net, for instance.
To my knowledge, almost no native UI libraries have good support for CSS-style selectors. Being able to write out selection rules like "odd elements in this kind of list of elements" is extremely useful.
This is going to sound silly, but almost no native UI toolkit has a good "screenshots" section on its website. Meanwhile you go over to Bootstrap and you see stuff you actually recognize. This is important! It proves that you can actually make nice looking things.
Stuff like interface designers shipped by MSFT are pretty great though.
Programming for the web makes me feel like I’m back in the 90s, no even Java/Swing was easier. I get making the sacrifice if it means I can run in the browser, but not otherwise.
I have fond memories of debugging C# with Msft tools, but I also suffered a decent amount on the debugging cycle in C/C++. Being able to just patch in some new code without going through a whole compile/set up the environment again is very useful.
I can understand thinking that the foundation of the web is bad, therefore web development is bad. But I would take the chrome debugger experience over C/PHP/Java debugging experience most days of the week.
(That being said, I could simply be unaware of some debugging tools in that space that make things nicer)
Doing UI in C/C++ sucks, but that was also true in the 90s.
Chrome is a horrible debugger from a UI design perspective. Debugging through VSCode is better, but I still miss simple things like auto toString displays. Surely the tools could get much better, that they haven’t is depressing.
I also don't notice my machine slowing down with Electron apps.
That's not true. There are native cross-platform GUI toolkits, such as Qt. There's just as much reason for a Qt app to run on Linux as an Electron app.
The alternative to many Electron apps isn't a native app in another framework, it would simply be no app (on linux).
One example of a service that probably _could_ have a web version is Spotify, but they only offer their service via their Electron app.
Apps I care about are VSCode, Atom, Spotify, Slack.
End user expectations are for complex layouts, flexible typography, rich media embedding, animated interactions, and so on. I've yet to see a QT app come close to what e.g. Slack has managed to shoehorn in.
It'd be great if we could get desktop level robustness out of it too, instead of being limited to scrolling three or four screens up before it has to start paging out content.
Web UI is bad in many ways, but many desktop adherents seem willfully oblivious about why there is such a desire for this. The only native OS that has evolved to compete is MacOS, with its multi touch driven interactions genuinely making most web stuff feel like the janky lowest common denominator that it is.
Meanwhile QML provides you with the same kind of programming paradigm except that you do not have a DOM, you have the QtQuick Scene Graph which calculates how to render your new state in the most efficient way; and, worth mentioning, in a much more efficient way than a standard browser stack would be able to under regular circumstances.
No, the best thing was flash.
second, Adobe AIR using 100% CPU is completely false
I can't think of anything good that has come out of electron. Seriously. Maybe slack (haven't used it) but that is probably about the worst use case for electron imaginable and would be utterly trivial to implement in a proper language natively.
Among terminal emulators for example, Hyper is the only one I can think of.
Don't forget HN is a bubble : Electron is very much appreciated outside of this particular community.
There might be tons, I just haven't seen anything usable.
Not seeing "anything usable" is pure bad faith.
But yes, VSCode is probably the exception. But they have had to spend a truly impressive effort to combat the shortfalls of electron and are to my knowledge the only ones that might have succeeded in making something relatively performant.
If that is what is required to make electron decent then few arguments in favor of it remains.
Yes I get that different sets of features on different platforms is an issue. But often that is half the point, if everything could be done on a website there is in the vast majority of cases no need for an electron "app".
Have you tried to develop a cross-platform app for Windows, macOS and Linux recently recently? I do not know what you mean by "trivial", but using HTML/CSS/JS is the fastest way to develop UIs, and so, apps/programs. No contest. (about performances or resources management, that's a whole other story).
And using different techs for each platform to have a native app is not what I call trivial for developers in terms of complexity.
This makes it useless for any non-trivial app that is CPU bound - including, games, audio, video, 3D, and many many more.
Just because it's easy to build a house with Lego doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that it's going to compete with professional building materials.
1. Use current dev team to develop only the web version?
2. Hire X teams to develop for X platforms? (there goes your linux support)
3. Hire 2nd team to work on a cross platform native desktop client?
4. Open APIs and leave it to the wolves?
Everyone on here is acting like a few hundred meg of ram and barely 0.5% CPU usage is the end of the fucking world.
Also, you'd be surprised how fast 4gb gets used up by the time the OS, the browser, and various Electron apps take their cut. I can't browse the web while having Slack and Spotify open or things start thrashing. I think it's past the point of ridiculousness when a simple chat app takes more memory than a full featured IDE like IDEA.
With javacript you have to constantly fight the language, the frameworks the performance etc. This will actually end up taking more time and effort than doing it properly in native languages once you get past the proof-of-concept stage.
Having a cross-platform core and then doing a platform specific GUI for each platform is a bit of work up front but hardly a big hurdle all things considered.
The advantages are that you actually get an app that looks and behaves the way it is intended on each platform. And an app that actually can be user friendly. Did we all just stop and say, hey, users suck. Why should we care about them? Let's give them an ugly mess that doesn't perform.
That by itself is a tragedy, but what is astonishing is that it is done for no good reasons.
Some of the appeal of electron is code-reuse and being able to use something other than javascript will make it easier to share code with native software rather than web pages. That would be a huge benefit in my eyes.
If something like Slack is "utterly trivial to implement in a proper language natively", why was Skype so awful for so long, to the point that they've now switched to Electron?
I'd much prefer if these companies used open APIs (some do) and let the FLOSS crowd make clients if they cared for them. I've replaced the spotify application with librespot lately and it works very well, although it lacks a UI so I have to use my phone as a remote. I'm also currently using the signal electron client which works okay but uses an order of magnitude more RAM after a few minutes of runtime than my irssi that's been running for months. It also doesn't have better usability if you don't like clicking everywhere and prefer keyboard control.
I don't hate electron, it's just "okay". It's a symptom of the webification of the world as web technologies make a foray into the desktop and server space. I think a framework like Qt is objectively superior, both from a developer and user perspective but I'm sure these days it's probably easier and cheaper to find webdevs than Qt devs and it's all that matters.
I've looked into alternative Slack clients for example which seem to be doable, but the only ones I saw were dead and/or looked terrible.
I've yet to see FLOSS crowd come up with a remotely useful client for anything. Event in the days of much simpler APIs and apps like IRC FOSS apps were universally meh.
Super small footprint, I can do everything with the keyboard, I can script it, I can run it on a server in SSH, I can customize it any way I want.
Meanwhile on my large screen I can barely see 10 messages in the backlog of the signal desktop client because it feels the need to emulate an SMS UI (you can even select if you want it to emulate the Android or iOS UI, how cool is that?), I still haven't figured out if you can create groups in the desktop interface (given the very small number of options available I don't see how I could miss it, maybe it's simply not possible). The input box has english spell checking enabled by default which is pretty distracting when I'm typing an other language since everything gets underlined, I haven't found a way to disable it or change the language.
The other day I had to use the Discord webapp for something, what a joke. On my pre-quantum Firefox it was laggy as hell, there was a noticeable delay sometimes while I was typing text. Maybe you'll blame Firefox for being too slow but we're talking about an actual text chat here.
It does look better than a terminal window though, I grant you that. Maybe I should print it and frame it somewhere in my office.
9 times out of 10, a github project fixes my bug report very quickly.
Half the time I'll send an email to a closed source project and never hear back about it.
FOSS is also doing well in an era where proprietary clients mean crappy electron clients. That's a low bar to beat.
It's funny, I try Vim and I like it. HN convinces me to try Emacs and I like it. I'm not supposed to like Electron apps but I try VS Code on my 4+ year old chromebook with 2gb of ram and it runs just fine and I like it. Same goes with Slack. Seems pretty damn good to me. This all repeats itself when it comes to programming language debates too.
Is something wrong with me if I'm interested in vim, emacs, vs code, python, js, elm, go(!), haskell, rust, and racket? Am I just too inexperienced? Will I develop to have only one true religion or is there just something HN and r/programming brings out in people for these constant "one true correct way" debates.
It probably does, if it's the only thing you're running. I know developers think their app is the best thing in the world but they have to realise it's not the only thing running on my machine. RAM is a scarce resource on my dev box.
I get mad about Electron because it seems that we should be able to solve the problem without running a web browser for every app. It's unfortunate that Electron is so much more appealing than more efficient alternatives. I wish we could end this trend of software efficiency declining to compensate for hardware improvements.
Really ? Because rendering HTML/CSS is an extremely complex way to render a UI, and it was clearly never designed for it. HTML was intended to add markup to documents, not build user interfaces. It lacks the most basic layout primitives you want to use in a UI and a lot of behaviour is either not well defined or not well understood, mainly because it's unreasonably complex. It's easily the most complicated way to build a UI we have right now, which is why we need all those stupid frameworks built on top of it to make it somewhat usable.
HTML is and has alway been a huge mistake for building UI's.
I disagree completely. It's easy to get a 'hello world' type thing working in HTML, sure, but it's very hard to make something behave like you want. Traditional UI toolkits are much simpler and easier to understand.
If you don't need to support IE11 you can use CSS Grid and do the entire layout in one or two CSS properties.
It's not that "HN hates Electron", but some competent programmers, especially ones who have experience creating desktop apps, point out that Electron apps are huge resource hogs. It's not about having an opinion, rather stating a fact.
Maybe these competent developers don't realize that lots of users don't care if their app use 100-200mo on an 8Go laptop. Nor do they realize that memory usage is one indicator among a few others that are as or more relevant to the various contexts: productivity, talent pool, cost, maintenance, etc. Trade-offs have to be made, Electron is one.
In the work environment (non-tech) I experienced several times that people complained about bad usability and apps slowing down the computer. More often than not, those were Electron apps. But the standard corporate solution is to just upgrade computers to 32gb ram and even faster processors. Not sure if the faster development speed in Electron still saves money then.
Don't get me wrong, I think Electron is generally a great idea. VSCode works great. Similar to websites, slow performance is rarely a fault of the underlying technology, it's a result of programmers not caring about performance.
Unless I've got Slack, Keybase, Spotify, etc open. Those just cripple the machine. Also Outlook, but I recently replaced it with Thunderbird and it seems to run much better. I find that my complaints are mostly met with accusations of being an old man (I'm 34...).
Native apps cost 10 times more and take a lot longer to build since you have to build 3 versions instead of 1.
So..?
If it is then we have failed horribly as an industry. We can do so much better, and we should strive to.
Beautiful is in the eye of the beholder. I much prefer consistent UI look and feel and Electron, may come close, it has it's nuances. It's probably my number one gripe. I'm on macOS though, so it could be different on your Linux desktop environment of choice or Windows. I still prefer TextMate 2.
I don’t know what the goals of the electron team are (unless they have shares in power companies and thus want CPU’s running at 100% everywhere) but I doubt their goal was making “desktop apps that aren’t available on linux”.
That’s the only way this would be irony.
The problem is that it isn't the solution to the UI problem. It's just yet another way in which developers can mindlessly fragment it even further.
For example, take Slack, Riot, Atom, VS Code, Keybase, etc. Not one of them makes an attempt to look like the host operating system. They don't use the native UI toolkit of the host platform. They don't even make any attempt to follow design conventions of the host platform.
Let's take macOS. In just about any text field in any application, you can right-click and get access to spell checking, substitutions and transformations. You can get macOS to read out the text you highlight by speech synthesis. Except for in Electron apps. Why? Because the text entry fields in Electron apps aren't typically native text entry fields. They're merely imitations and bad ones at that.
Also none of these Electron apps look or behave like each other either. Every developer has taken it upon themselves to play UI designer (almost always badly too) and to create their own buttons and their own sidebars and their own menus and their own controls and not a single one of them looks or feels like a first-class citizen in my operating system.
So the learned behaviour I've collected from 15 years of using Macs is now suddenly useless in Electron applications. Why? Because either developers want to cut corners, or some incompetent project manager wants 3 platforms supported by last week, and by the way, fuck your users, I need this done.
As with everything web-based, design and function are too closely intertwined and the result is consistently mediocre (if not terrible) user experience.
I'm not a system programmer by any means, but I consider myself well-rounded enough to be able to appreciate useful technology.
CSS grids and responsive @media, e.g. [1], are a useful addition to native applications design.
I like the electron/react/react native ecosystem - I really do, and this is coming from someone who dislikes javascript a priori. But is HTML/CSS/JS really the best we can do for desktop and mobile applications? I know responsive-cross platform saves money for a lot of startups and orgs, and I'm not saying the web stack doesn't have it's place.
I frequently imagine something that takes the best ideas from react/redux and from other ui and layout frameworks and lets you build something that has consistent, cross platform (desktop and mobile, maybe even web with some kind of compilation pathway to js or webasm), responsive ui, without the huge web stack. Maybe Python? It's got lots of competent developers in the market to support it. Maybe Rust or Go, if something lower-level was desired. Or language-agnostic, though sticking with one might be valuable.
As funny anecdote, CSS Grid was originally proposed by XAML team.
Google apparently is pushing for the low level rendering control that native UI APIs enjoy on their Houdini project. Right now, it is yet again a Chrome only feature.
Oh, and that one is practically designed around a hybrid C++, so if you don't like C++ (last time I tried C++ with mingw on Windows I had a horrible time installing libraries), you're out of choices.
msys2 (http://www.msys2.org/) solves package management quite nicely, at least for the more popular libraries and tools.
QML and JavaFX are cross-platform, XAML is cross platform via Avalonia or Xamarin.Forms.
Anyone using C++ on Windows for GUI development should use Visual C++, C++ Builder or the gcc toolchain integrated in the Qt installer.
Avalonia is at beta level at best, would you bet your startup on it? Xamarin.Forms ok, but XAML is not 100% the same everywhere, anyway. WPF is not Xamarin.Forms.
http://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/
> XAML is not 100% the same everywhere, anyway.
Hence XAML Standard,
And be incredibly shitty.
If you care about your users and their experience, you won't write apps in JS to begin with.
Anything else should take advantage of the native UI/UX tooling.
If you have been building GUIs in Visual Studio or VBA, you're probably not going to suddenly switch to Electron.
And if you have mostly been writing Python scripts for the terminal, you might use something like Gooey [1] to build a basic GUI with almost no additional effort.
Having to manually mutate the UI instead of describing it with a `render` function feels like a huge step back. Even data binding is often too limited.
Trying to get a screen in Android to have the correct layout and style is also way clunkier - even with ConstraintLayout.
Web stack doesn't have any mature option, besides maybe avril, that matches what something like Blend or QML designer offers.
I mean, shouldn't you care more about shipping a good product (i.e. developing something that doesn't thrash your users' resources) than ease of development?
I get that if it's too hard to develop there's no product to speak of, but still, aren't we going too far off the equilibrium point?
* Standards based with no single entity or company "owning" it.
* Multiple mature competing implementations.
* Massive support across the industry and a huge ecosystem.
I am yet to see the huge ecosystem for Web components that matches component libraries like those from DevExpress or ComponentOne.
Lately, major vendors (with Edge, that includes Microsoft) are agreeing on standards, developing them FAST, and the web moves forward faster than it has ever moved. Long gone are the days where your standards can get stopped for multiple years. And vendor prefixes are less prevalent now as features get implemented properly sooner.
https://ishoudinireadyyet.com/
https://www.webcomponents.org/
Also, to use those standards, one needs to have access to latest browser versions, which never happens beyond controlled environments.
So typical web development always needs Modernizr, Babel, Polyfills (when possible) around.
Your argument makes no sense in the year 2018.
Of course if they just stick with the ideal model of hypertext documents, with a little bit of JS, it doesn't make sense.
As for web apps, I am ok with them, provided they run on the browser I have already installed, instead of faking native apps.
I'm genuinely curious. Years ago, I used several Qt apps, and they never felt native. They felt like Java Swing or Delphi apps. Clunky and not pretty. Slack, to me, doesn't _look_ quite native, but it still doesn't feel like an outsider on the platform.
I imagine that using native Apple kits are easy from C++ thanks to ObjC interop, no idea about Android.
There are a number of existing UI frameworks that fit this description. As a starting point, I'd suggest checking out QML:
Qt or wxWidgets, make a supported C iface (I am aware of some work on both fronts, e.g. wxc that was used by wxHaskell I think?). IUP and libui, thicken your libs (libui guy just got permission from his new company to get back working on the lib, yay). World, don't hate non-native-OS-widgeted apps. Browser vendors, stop being so tunnel-visioned into your my-OS-only, non-embeddable, or must-be-multiprocess shit. And let us trim some fat off at compile time please (waiting on you Servo, but please stay lean and single-process for embeddability). JVM AOT...we're waiting, we know it's coming.
And no, I would rather not have an interpreted (or dynamic) language if I can help it.
Edit: To clarify before a ton of responses pick apart my specific criticisms, I'm making these points to show there is a void. I could poke a ton more holes in these libs and more (I have used most), but it's hardly worth arguing the nuances here.
* incomplete
* immature
* not up to date
and definitely out-of-tree, aka not maintained by the folks that make the original toolkit.
Would you bet your company on those bindings?
And to be honest, modern C++11/14/17 is quite a different language, more friendly to beginners compared to 90s C++ people remember.
Writing C++ with wxWidgets or Qt really feels like Java or C# with their batteries.
What? AOT is available in Java even on Debian, the next step is Java-on-Java stack. HotSpot is about to be deprecated in 4 weeks once Graal becomes default for all platforms in Java10.
> java --list-modules | grep aot
> jdk.aot@9-Debian
If this is a thing now, supported and official - why it's not more popular? (or maybe I'm wrong).
The majority of commercial JDKs always supported AOT to native code, only Sun did not, as they were religiously against AOT.
Oracle thankfully thinks otherwise, has kept sponsoring MaximeVM research, which became Graal and SubstrateVM, and now they are in the process of even re-writing the C++ parts into Java (Project Metropolis).
Yes, AoT is now supported in Java out of box. Java after Jigsaw projects is modularized and you can build an executable file, like .exe or .bin which contains minimal JVM in it with JVM modules and your own modules and it's dependencies. You can read more about it here https://steveperkins.com/using-java-9-modularization-to-ship...
>If this is a thing now, supported and official - why it's not more popular? (or maybe I'm wrong).
Probably because a lot of developers still think Java is slow, many peoples opinion on Java is from 10 years ago. AoT was officially released in OpenJDK a few weeks ago, so as you can see, a lot of people don't know about it yet.
[1] https://steveperkins.com/using-java-9-modularization-to-ship...
Heck, even on desktops, sometimes the UIs feel quaint and antiquated: no back button/undo by default, many times scrolling failures at different resolutions (the settings screen doesn't fit at a certain resolution and the button is out-of-screen somewhere), text can't be selected and copy-paste by default...
Yes, you can argue: "that's not fair", "for a professional programmer that's worth only a few weeks of work's for massive productivity improvements", etc., but things don't work that way.
Most developers have been conditioned to not use commercial products, if they can. With an extra downside for the commercial product being closed source.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/goahead 1 - https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18602
Making a super high quality cross platform UI toolkit is very hard, both in regards to core implementation and maintenance. Open Source did its best, but it apparently wasn't enough. Commercial vendors can't really get adoption cause everyone expects free and even Open Source solutions.
I feel that there's a catch-22 somewhere here :)
So it is definitely possible to make a framework/toolkit although if you look at development history of browsers how many years it took them to get where they are and Opera throwing in the towel and switching to Blink.
Only question is, if they do such a toolkit what is there remaining for OS vendors to do? Kernels? Users will just choose faster one.
But is it on-par with native offerings? Where are the standardized components? How many years did it take to get a simple grid layout present in Tk back in 1991? Where's the fool-proof GUI editor? How long did it take for it to have a date input?
The web had to fight its way to where it is now. And that's why it has so many scars (besides the self-inflicted DOM and Javascript before strict mode and ECMAScript 5).
Regarding the OS vendors, well, yes, kernels, tools, basic apps. Also not all applications are graphical.
Before web stack there was Flash it had hardware access but it was insecure, now web tech going the same way with web assembly and webgl.
They're supposed to. They're fitting in with the OS's native look and feel. And that's a GOOD THING.
So, by the logic of making your complements a commodity, what is FogCreek trying to make a commodity of with Glitch? Are they trying to make "building apps" (and thus "getting into programming") a commodity so they get more users to StackOverflow?
Also, does anyone have any good material to suggest on this topic? I'd like to learn more about it and learn how to be able to recognize the things for what they are: complements or products.
Well but then there's a big missed opportunity there, isn't it? I mean, it sounds like a principle like that would apply to most scenarios, unless you are too small to even think of making an impact on your complements markets with your financial power. In that case, sure.
The only common ABI among all programming languages is C. For a UI lib to work with all languages, we end up with wrappers for C libraries. If not we end up with language specific libs like Swing. We need a common ABI that's better than C.
QML?
Or if you want native applications, what is wrong with Cocoa, Qt, and XAML? A cross-platform toolkit will either be the lowest-common denominator between the platforms (this has been tried before, see e.g. AWT, SWT, wxWidgets) or something that is alien to each platform (Electron). Small independent development companies have done applications across multiple platforms by using their native toolkits for decades. And now suddenly, it is too expensive for GitHub, Slack, and others to develop applications with platform UI toolkits? They are just transferring the cost to the users. We get inconsistent shortcuts, widgets, etc. between programs. No automator support, etc.
There is only a benefit to people who use multiple platforms and want to applications to look the same on every platform. But the vast majority of users just uses one platform, or two if we include tablets/phones (which have different input methods anyway).
Really? How many programs supported Linux before electron?
Don’t take this the wrong way (I was a full time Linux/BSD desktop user from 1994 to 2007 and still have one Linux desktop machine at home), but do we really want to significantly degrade the experience of 99% of the users for 1% of the market?
We're throwing away all kinds of HIG achievements since 1984, for the sake of pretty colors and superfluous transitions. Not too long ago, a considerable effort was spent to make web apps behave like desktop apps, now the inverse is true.
I blame the rise of "UX", just like "DevOps" is too blame for needless infrastructure.
Making desktop apps look and feel like web apps.Something like my business expense tracking app, though? If I wanted it to sync and be functionally identical to the app on my phone? I could see this framework being used for that.
you can't just drop a sentence like that and not elaborate on it - unless you want to offend somebody.
Each resource hungry "DevOps" tool has its place and has its worth. They're just often misused. A small IT firm with <10 Hypervisors won't need openstack for example. Thats only worth its maintenance if you're working with tens or hundreds or hardware machines.
And a webapp which consists of <10 services probably doesn't need service discovery and advanced de-/commissioning of containers/vms. Administering hundreds of microservices without that is borderline impossible however.
Never mind that if it's your sole job, you have to demonstrate value and that often leads away from generic solutions.
People browse Stack Overflow and hacker news differently too. There is no set of rules that are generic AND usable in all these cases.
And you do not read a Medium.com article the same way you set something up with your goverment in a goverment website, browsing through hundreds of options.
Not that I believe that the amount of different interaction patterns is justified on the web; the lack of almost any kind of standard widgets just made this a free-for-all bikeshedding design space. In the long run, I doubt that your measurably superior solution to editing an entry in a grid is better than using the same pattern in every data grid.
Quite often I'm reminded of readability tests using different fonts, where the one people liked best often wasn't the one with the best reading comprehension. If you're picking a font for your OS, there was little choice and the customer probably bought it already. On the web, they can go to <rival product #341> because that uses Helvetica Neue and not Akzidenz Grotesk.
What I see from UX/UI people is that consistency means an app has the same look and feel across OS platforms and the web, and it matches the corporate house style/identity.
The idea that apps should be consistent with the platform they are running on is completely dead. Even the OS platforms themselves don't have a consistent look and feel in any given version. Not to mention that that metaphorical fish has been flipped in the pan so many times that it has just disintegrated.
No one cares about consistency with OS platforms except us nerds on forums like this.
Or maybe the JVM approach, where there's one electron process on the system, and all the electron apps on the system are run in the same process. That way at least the rendering/JS engine can be shared. It'd be like Firefox before electrolysis. Though, having your chat client crash and also take down your music player and code editor seems like a terrible user experience.
That would be solved if you had one Electron binary that started each app, much like a JVM. They would still be different processes so one app couldn't bring down another, but at least they would share memory pages and copy on write which would make the multi-electron-app world better. (IMO)
It would also have the benefit that you could update once and not run an old chat app with old Chrome security issues, until each developer decides to update Electron. But I guess the argument against that is that it's no longer "truly cross platform" since an Electron app may have to support multiple Electron versions. This is how things always have been though, developers just seem a lot more lazy about it nowadays.
The solution I am pursuing right now is Microsoft's Xamarin. The C#\XAML stack supports iOS, Android, MacOS and Android. The only thing it is missing is web. But with a couple serious projects working on compiling C# to WebAssembly perhaps that will happen.
Xamarin.Forms has no relationship to WinForms.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/02/06/blazor-ex...
1. Make the apps look pixel perfectly the same on all platforms - that's what the Java Swing did. Result - all the apps feel "alien" and not native for the users.
2. Make all the apps look and behave native and use UX patterns consistent to the given platform. Result - you will have to program them differently.
3. Somewhere in between - all you get is mediocre GUI with not very pleasant development model.
So the problem is not with the GUI toolkits but with inconsistent UX paradigms between the platforms / different input models, interaction models, etc.
For example I love the Telegram desktop app.
Swing is unusable and ugly.
Just look at and try to use a Swing file picker.
...
Anyway, I'd gladly program them differently for closer to native experience, if it were easy to program. Currently it's either Qt (C++) or GTK (C), or completely useless/out-of-date bindings.
And thus any glorified WebView reigns supreme.
Meanwhile the tooling to deal with missing pieces or complications that are not missing is complex enough that both new and experienced devs complain.
The less said about the security complexity the better.
And I'm saying all of that as someone that uses these daily and enjoys it.
BUT...is it the best that is practical for the time? Probably. There have been efforts to replace these options...theyve failed. Perhaps wasm will change things, but perhaps not.
Until then though, I think it is interesting to ask "Why?" Why, if these other options are superior, do they not catch on? Linux, git, nginx, these are just a few examples of dramatic tech switches that had to overcome an existing base.
It isnt just backwards compatibility either - Babel exists for es6+, but I've not seen a non js-like language that can compile to js achieve much success. I suspect there are one or two areas that the current offerings handle well that aren't being credited or understood.
Computer UI is a young field, computer interactions with business and marketing over time are all poorly understood. We spend much of our time reinventing our spinning wheels and relearning lessons. Html in js is bad. No, it is good. Inline css is bad. No, it is good.
This isn't all wasted time, there is a lot of learning time. So I doubt we even understand yet what would make a better toolset.
React Native doesn't use HTML/CSS at all for rendering.
I see so many websites trying to implement their own UI behaviors and getting it wrong, not scrolling smoothly, showing a modal window partially off screen in certain scenarios, preventing you from zooming out on a smartphone while overflowing the text outside of the screen, menus that are either not touch or mouse friendly, etc.
Giving UI developpers only html and css is like telling a graphic designer: all you need is microsoft paint, you see you can change the color of each pixel to whatever you want, total freedom! Yeah... No.
If you want, you can make a framework on top of it that will behave like a desktop UI framework with standardized elements and behaviours. There are plenty of such frameworks actually. But not having to use such a framework is nice.
Besides, the current browser environment has been historically heavily optimized for websites, not desktop apps. If it became a popular choice for desktop app UI we'd have developed more appropriate features for that use case.
On the web the role of desktop UI frameworks is distributed between third party frameworks such as Bootstrap which is great because those are optional.
I haven't worked with the windows frameworks you mention to compare directly to them.
Tables are just unstyled boxes with an alignment rule. Not very high level.
Buttons are provided by the host OS, HTML and CSS have nothing to do with their default style or behaviour, and if you start styling them you basically revert to working from unstyled boxes.
Also there are existing projects like https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos
I think WPF/XAML could have worked also but there were not much work to port it to anything but Windows.
To have a good UI system, you need extensibility, you need testing, you need strong types (this one is debatable, but I truly believe this to be true after working with Typescript-based HTML UI-s for the past 6+ months now), and you need performance.
I can understand that a lot of programmers got into the mindset of "no, I wont deal with HTML", and I frequently see devs mentioning that they prefer that apps look "native", which is something that has not been a standard in the mainstream dev world for quite a few years now, but the reality is that that "native" dream is gone. People all around the world interact with mobile apps MORE than their dessktop/mobile system'S native ui, so there is no baseline to go back to, there is no good old days to retrieve.
We can only move forward with what we have learned, imho. And that might be or might not be HTML, but if something comes along, it better learn all the lessons that we collectively are learning with working through HTML-CSS-JS SPA's.
A few years ago I made Anvil - a React-ish framework for Android for native UI (reactive, declarative, works best with Redux) and have been using it in many production apps as long as I was doing Android development. But it still is a niche product, most developers prefer visual UI editor and whatever is the official Google way to do Android apps. Still, I'm very proud of Anvil.
https://github.com/zserge/anvil
Then, once I had to deal with desktop apps I figured out that HTML/CSS/JS seems to be the best option for custom (no native widgets) and modern (animations, shadows, nice fonts etc) UI. But Electron was a heavy beast, so I made a tiny wrapper over native browser engines (webviews). So far I'm very happy with it, it's much lighter and smaller than electron. And it's very convenient to use from C++ or Go. Some kind people added Rust and Nim support, I'm now working on Python and Node.js bindings. So yeah, it's pretty much language-agnostic, although it's still web UI.
I really hope it can take it's niche for small desktop apps that don't need the full power of Electron, yet need to have a good look.
It's certainly not without it's problems though. JS sucks and native performance is way better, but no one can deny it's so much more flexible and powerful than any other thing out there.
Here is a great article on this topic: https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
I try first with html and the native webview. With iOS is totally fine, but Android is SUPER slow. I never imagine that android was this bad, but at least, it force me to do native :)
----
I think that is possible to do what you describe, and I'm working something like. The key is decouple some task (kinda separate "back-end" UI from "front-end" UI):
We can do "partial" cross-platform UI, if we think that some stuff can actually cross cleanly:
- Layout (the big one, IMHO) with something like https://yogalayout.com
- The ELM architecture (https://www.elm-tutorial.org/en/02-elm-arch/01-introduction....) because a big chunk of the logic is totally cross-platform and "only" need to adapt the render of controls.
- Dispatching, events and similar stuff, that is not visual.
Then finally, the rest can be fully native:
- Controls
- Drawing
- Animations
- Call to native libs
----
The big question is what to use for coding this. I'm using .net but wish to have something more low-level. I know swift and it could work for other targets (Java, .NET, native) with http://elementscompiler.com
Wish to have a coding partner to do this :)
Funny that QML looks alot like the JavaFX script that was abandoned
1) There is no way to separate the Electron engine from your app, so you have to bundle Chrome and Node with each app.
2) Electron has an autoUpdater API, but since Electron doesn't solve the installation/updates problem e2e (packager + installer + updates server) it's really a half baked solution. This is specially bad in Windows since Squirrel for Windows is in my experience a disaster.
I have a number of Electron apps in production, internally and for our customers, and for our next desktop project we won't be using Electron.
The idea of using web technologies for the UI is still very valid IMO, but considering the 2 previous problems it's way less of a headache to just make our own native wrapper in C# and Swift (sorry Linux) and finally distribute the app via the official stores. At least for our use case.
I've never seen this feature in desktop.
Closes thing I know are these "hosted web app" in Windows 10. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/hwa-cre...
https://www.lifewire.com/create-shortcuts-in-google-chrome-f...
I'm really curious (as a non-Electron developer) why that's a problem at all, let alone a big problem. You have to provide the entire package, but you have control over what the user gets and ultimately, what you'll have to support.
So yes, the developer gets complete control over which version of Chrome and Node is used, but you end up with a 150 MB text editor, a 150 MB chat app, and a 150 MB music streaming app, when you could probably get all three done with 152 MB using common dependencies.
1. Disk space. Electron, node, shared dependencies, that adds up. 300-500mb/app is not reasonable. 10 apps installed? 5 gigabytes! Wtf?
2. Security updates. Security issue in blink/v8? You need to update 10 apps instead of 1 lib. And I sure hope those apps are responsible enough to update themselves.
3. Bonus: CPU&RAM. Want to run 3 apps? Well, have fun with your 3 instances of chrome running. It adds up. I have 16GB of ram, I used to think it would last me forever and then the electron craze started to seriously limit me in the amount of concurrency I can have on my desktop.
Like GP said, Electron for UI is a valid pattern that has some pretty extreme issues preventing it from being a straight up good pattern. My bet is that an electron server on the desktop solves all this.
Just glanced at my Applications folder on OSX. Slack's looks to weigh in at 180 MB and VS Code at 160 MB. Am I missing something?
[0]: Judging solely on the screenshots provided, which show a menu bar inside the app window on macOS. I’m sure things will improve with time.
Beta was released a week ago, actually - http://avaloniaui.net/blog/2018-02-18-avalonia-beta1.html
I know there is a lot of Flash hate out there but Air+Flex(+FlashDevelop) was a pretty nice solution for building , debugging and distributing cross platform apps.
I was trying to install an Adobe Air app on a Linux machine a while back and ran into this problem.
ironically you can also embed Flash into an Electron app to use the latest v28 runtime
other workaround exists with the latest NPAPI that you can embed in a C++ app (like good old WxWidgets)
I still think AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. It was really ahead of its time.
ORLY?
It has been many years that Adobe AIR is updated on a quarterly basis, every March, June, September and December
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/flashplayer-air-featur...
Major features are the ones that matter. It took Adobe like 3-4 years to bring concurrency to iOS. AS4 was killed after years of promises. Etc.
How the hell do slack, discord, and gitter STILL not collapse their sidebars when you resize the containing window to be tall and narrow? It makes them unusable in a tiling WM, and it's generally disrespectful of screen real estate in any WM.
This is the price of easily accessible development. We're doomed to relive past mistakes in UI, as new developers are blissfully unaware of lessons learned by existing frameworks.
Many people here are saying electron is popular because of a lack of sane, consistent toolkits across each OS. There's also security to think of too. Electron is likely very insecure relative to native software, but the responsibility is purely on the electron devs: freeing the app developer of that burdon. Electron rose in an environment with no competition in that regard. But now, Windows has UWP, and Mac has their own app platform. I sincerely hope we see these more universally leveraged, such that developers will stop abusing the web for app development.
And I guess Linux will just have to make a WINE for UWP, I can't imagine the Linux community coming together to create something like that for themselves.
I might be wrong, but isn't that literally Snap Packages?
To be honest, people using Electron are doing it because of huge business / process wins and worse performance is a generally acceptable downside. Performance is improving as Chromium improves, but it isn’t a huge focus in the Electron community.
Really, it's as if all this fundamental computer science, O(n), finding the shortest path, all these efforts in optimization that we do at universities - as if all this just went down the drain and the moment you leave the CS department you say, "Ah, screw all this, I'll just allocate all I can, just in case". This is just so wasteful and it really makes me sad that so few people care.
You get all the tradeoffs of Chrome (e.g. cache everything you come by) outside of Chrome proper.
I'm not sure when this became the new normal, but I was taught the exact opposite. How about trying to squeeze that into 200 MB rather than allocating 4-10 GB just because it happens to be available at that moment?
Is it good if a company employs a 100 people but only 15 of them do work and the rest is idle?
Now, as for using all available memory: that's exactly the reasoning that causes so much problems for users, and that's why after so many years of hardware upgrades our machines still feel sluggish: using all resources for your app, only because they happen to be free at that moment, is not OK.
First of all, they are free now, but they might not be a moment later (because another brilliant app author has the same idea and tries to allocate everything). Second, the resources should be used in a reasonable way. If a piece software doing extremely simple computation is suddenly allocating a few gigs of RAM and takes over all cores, my thought isn't "Oh, what an efficient app, it's using all these resources I don't need", but I wonder what went wrong! What is perfectly OK for, say, a 3D rendering node, is completely wrong for an app that could do the same thing with 10x lower resource usage.
I'm not sure if I am able to explain it in more clear terms.
The thing is native apps can do that, and more in less memory. The baseline here is set by "how much is needed", not "how much memory is available".
>Is it good if a company employs a 100 people but only 15 of them do work and the rest is idle?
Yes, if 15 can do the job. then rest can moved for other profitable purposes, or laid off.
An entry-level computer nowadays has 4GB of memory. Not free memory, total memory. That 4GB has to be shared between the operating system, all running apps, and the disk cache.
> and it should be utilised if it's available instead of being wasted by being unused.
If it's available, any modern operating system will use it for the disk cache, instead of leaving it unused.
It's the OS's job to use the free memory for caching the filesystem. If you have special workloads that benefit from more memory you usually change an entry in a config file to the appropriate value or change a settings in the GUI. That's it. No you don't just try to consume as much memory as possible for no reason. You're messing with the OS's ability to use the memory optimally. It's not wasted, you're the one who's wasting it.
These values may not be accurate because they don't include images but they are still very far away from a blanket statement like "150MB per tab".
Clearly we can see that electron has a lot of room for potential and if they fix these flaws there would be no need to critize it, yet they don't even give the slightest damn about it.
The light package could then be offered as an alternative download on the website to run on a specific "electron-runner" that can run multiple electron apps side by side.
I know that I just described a regular browser with tabs or windows but hey, Electron is what we have right now and it is not going away soon. This might be a solution for people running multiple Electron apps side by side.
Nevertheless, it is going to be re-enabled so it is worth reading up on shared memory in JavaScript -- more to the point, Atomics.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
I know a lot of people scoff at the Node/browser runtimes, which is warranted and totally unrelated to the language known as JavaScript, but performance is improving.
EDIT: Found that the correct flag is "--harmony-sharedarraybuffer". If directly running electron, then you would use "electron --js-flags="--harmony-sharedarraybuffer" index.html" (or "." instead of "index.html"). If using the electron quick start repository, you can add the flag above to package.json.
Another idea is that when wasm will be able to interface with DOM, you'd be able to write GUI code in any language which compiles to wasm. So you won't _need_ Rust (or Go, or Haskell, or D, or your up and coming toy language) bindings for win32, Qt, GTK, etc. Just waste a few hundred megs (only partially /s) and you've got a full ui.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/02/06/welcoming-pro...
"macOS Changed a macOS thing. #123
Windows Changed a Windows thing. #123"
Though looking at it, the actual description is no longer than "changed an X thing".
> We should use the icon of exe as window's icon, and we also need to add a default icon for atom-shell on Windows.
The JS ecosystem as a whole needs to improve but as far as Electron goes, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised with how well it has been doing even though we are handling data from multiple exchanges at a rate that is not so trivial.
Whether this is wise is another question.
These are acceptable for people who use their computer as a Facebook machine but "modern" software really taxes them.
It's the Wild West, without a standard library and tons of options for the same problems.
Of course versioning will be an issue so you might still need multiple versions for compatibility reasons. You might need a copy of 1.6.16, 1.6.17, 1.8.0, 1.8.2, and 2.0.0 to server your collection of apps. How to solve that problem would require some thought. When a user starts an app, if the version it is built against (or one it is otherwise marked as compatible with) isn't present do you warn the user and refuse to run, warn the user but run with the next best thing as it might just work, or automatically kick off a download? For systems where people are used to having a package manager this can be relatively transparent (apt install myElectronApp, pulls a versioned electron package if needed at the same time) but less so on Windows.
Perhaps it would be to complex (so potentially bug ridden) for the savings involved. Filesystem block-level deduplication might help the space issue, though not the download issue.
The current model isolates the runtime to every app. The download size may be big but I have a guarantee that my app will work without interference from others. Honestly, that guarantee justifies the binary size for me.
It doesn't feel as heavy as electron apps.
Ran into this last night. https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/2813
It would be awesome to be able to use the full node.js environment with a headless browser natively.(headless chrome with puppeteer is good but electron would be better)
As of version 2.0.0, Electron will strictly adhere to Semantic Versioning.
Major Version Increments
* Chromium version updates
* Node.js major version updates
* Electron breaking API changes
TCL/TK is still a thing and MacOSX still ships with wish, it even runs on android. The one platform you can't use it for is the iPhone.