I think this is misdirected criticism. WebAssembly runs at almost native speeds on a single very lightweight "VM".
Building a native app to wasm to package it into Electron sounds really weird to me. OK there's a security benefit thanks to sandboxing, but using Electron as a sandbox is really a strange idea.
And when it comes to portability, if you build you native app to webassembly, it can run anywhere. But if you add Electron to the mix, you need to build a different version for each platform, which destroy the portability benefit. If your app can be built on wasm, it can probably be compiled for different platform already. Adding Electron to the mix doesn't change any of that.
Electron can.
Electron is great if you don't want to write native code (and deal with the debugging complexity of C or C++). If you already have a cross-plateform native app in written with Qt, why the hell would you want to put that in Electron?! And remind that if your C++ isn't cross-plateform already, you won't be able to build to wasm.
I don't think the user experience of Web apps has to be worse than native, but even if we grant that it's worse, I'll take it over the pain of installing apps. And, based on the experiences of numerous SaaS companies, I'm far from alone in this. A lot of native app developers wail and gnash their teeth about how the Web is a technically inferior solution (which, again, I disagree with, but let's leave that aside). But, from my point of view, native apps on the mainstream desktop platforms have consistently failed to get deployment right, and that's terribly important to users in practice.
Take, say, LibreOffice. Is it better than Google Docs? Sure, probably. But I have such basic needs in word processing and spreadsheets that the marginally better user experience of the native app doesn't make up for the added annoyance of downloading LibreOffice and keeping it up to date. All indications are that most users are like me.
No more piracy, users only get access to the UI part.
They care use whatever they want from open source, without giving anything back and the world will only find out about license misuse if they employees speak out.
Best of all, they own their user's data, making it even harder to move away from them, than it ever was with Office formats.
At least with native code I can check what is on my hard disk.
And given my experience, it is hardly the case any company outside the big SV ones or whose main business is unrelated to software, that actually bothers to contribute anything back.
And there is no way to validate that.
while i agree with your point about this being sub-optimal for both software-development and free software as a whole, i think it is a separate issue.
> Distributing full fledged programs like this via browsers is simply going to be a shit user experience
These statements are simply FUD. Single click "installation" with no dependency management to virtually every platform out there at near-native speed is a huge benefit. And browsers are already capable of installing desktop menu entries and icons, and running frameless in a way that looks no different from any other native application.
Really ? I've heard about the concept of Progressive Web Apps that could do that but I thought it was more a long term-goal for browsers. I didn't know you could do that already. Any pointers on how I can use it ?
It is great for intranet applications for large companies and other internal tools that are already in it, but otherwise it is a non starter.
Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems. Not when it is the whole app.
It can be used to emulate a native GUI, just like languages can "compile" to javascript, and everyone can pretend it's really bytecode. But that doesn't mean this is a good idea, or that an actual bytecode for the web is just reinventing the wheel.
>Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems. Not when it is the whole app.
We don't really know that yet. Everything around Webassembly is still at the preview/POC stage, Webassembly itself hasn't matured and we don't know what sort of tooling, caching or modular integration of code would be feasible within browsers to make downloading software more efficient than just downloading one giant WASM blob.
Qt should create an html/Dom/css front end that binds to the webassembly backend. Would be more efficient and web friendly.
The mechanisms are still there but the practice died when Qt stopped focusing on embedded targets.
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/08/18/introducing-the-qt-lite-pr...
Embedded is the biggest market for Qt right now.
1) Qt Widgets development stopped with 5.0. I had bugs filed on the embedded Linux targets and was told "sorry, these will never be fixed".
2) #1 means that Qt wants you to use QML. I need to run a Javascript engine on my target? Note in the comments of that blog post that they hope to run on an A7 (or really fast M7)...someday.
2b) ...And if they do run on a lower end platform, you still need a POSIX O/S. uCLinux is not a great option on M3/M4 CPUs and keeping the binding dynamic on those cores to stay LGPL compliant is extremely difficult.
3) QML bindings are a pain in the ass, especially when you're trying to put a UI on legacy code.
4) Most crucial: Qt Lite and QtDC are commercial products only.
So, in my opinion, embedded is still a 2nd class player. Or, I could clarify further: low end embedded is a 2nd class player. If you're working on automotive HMI/IVI? They'd love your business.
I've shipped a dozen products with it over the course of my career.
On embedded targets I'd never use anything else. The alternatives are way too simple or overscripted playback engines that have no flexibility with underlying code.
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/02/22/qt-roadmap-2018/
> So, quite many new things for Qt Quick users, but not to worry – we have not forgotten users of Qt Widgets. On the contrary, already during the past year we have been increasingly addressing open bugs of Qt Widgets and intend to continue doing so during 2018 and beyond. Both Widgets and Qt Quick have their strong points and they complement each other nicely as fully supported parts of the Qt offering.
Web-apps are architected fundamentally different than classical software.
#include <QLabel>
#include <QApplication>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
QApplication app{argc, argv};
QLabel label{"hello world!"};
label.show();
return app.exec();
}
$ g++ -O2 -g0 -fPIC hello.cpp -I/usr/include/qt -I/usr/include/qt/QtWidgets -lQt5Widgets -lQt5Core
$ du -csh a.out
16K a.out
So nice to see people fabricating numbers and passing them off as data.
That's not why these demos "Hello Framework" demos are 3-7MB though. That's due to the cost of shipping an entire widget system that takes complete responsibility for everything between raw user input to pixels on the screen, without using many of the affordances of browser APIs. This is really awesome for emulation, sandboxing, and preservation of software, but it's not a good route for saving bytes for the user.