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Comment by zabana | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of negative comments on these electron threads (rightfully so, especially if one cares about resources / performance). Question is: what other frameworks would you recommend for developing cross-platform desktop apps ?

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Qt is pretty good and has been around a while. The criticisms of it are well established and known, too. Which should make it easy to evaluate.

I don’t have a good answer to the framework question, but I do have an opinion about cross-platform. Why make cross-platform a priority over efficiency and user experience? I bounce between Mac and Windows daily, and my least favorite apps are those that try to run on both. They are often resource hogs and provide a UI experience that feels worse than native apps. Electron apps have the least bad UI experience, but are resource hogs. One app I use for work, Mendeley, uses Qt for its UI I believe, and it’s garbage on both platforms- so I use the web interface instead. Give me a good native app instead of a suboptimal cross platform one.

I often think the issue isn’t cross platform though: it’s that there is a cohort of developers who know a toolchain (JS+web), and use frameworks that let them live in that instead of investing the time and effort to learn how to write an app well using a toolchain not built for those focused on web/browser models of programming.

Electron does not magically make your app work like shit - if you treat it like any other framework and actually invest resources into architecture and optimization it (surprise!) results in a good software, eg: vs code. Problem is it also allows to disregard all that and quickly prototype a solution that works good enough for some, and forget about all the optimization. That's real problem, but it's not tied in any way to electron. Same people would go and make a shitty app in qt if there was no electron, or just wouldn't make anything.

Since we're on the topic of music players, I'll comment here that the lack of foobar2000 on Linux is frustrating. I don't have the wherewithal to contribute to a port, the maintainer doesn't seem interested, and things like quodlibet and deadbeef just don't hold a candle.

That said, if foobar2000 had been made cross-platform initially, it may never have been very good. Who can say.

Yes, I am new to all of this so I see the electron hate because of the resource usage but then never see any meaningful discussion on what people would rather be used.

It seems to be this Qt thing which appears to have it's own tradeoffs (which are?) and then...is that it? So is it going to be a case of not having any cross platform desktop apps or having something that uses 2-300mb of RAM that developers won't give you street cred for?

Maybe the focus should be on making electron more performant. Sounds like MS has found a way to do it with VS Code so doesn't that sound like a better alternative than to not have any cross platform apps?

Proton native and Vuido look pretty good if you want to stick to JS. Not sure about the performance though but I like the idea

Electron is not "just" a webview like people seem to think - it's more like node in that it comes with a lot of features to integrate into the system, such as autoupdating, tray, power saving stuff or touchbar. If you just want to draw windows using js proton native and vuido work fine, otherwise not nearly the same category.

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