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Comment by DanFeldman | Hacker News Reader

We use Qt heavily at Starsky Robotics. We initially used it because it has tight integration with ROS via RQT [1], but I'm pretty impressed with the framework in general. Lots of great tools out of the box, QtCreator is awesome and once you get the right signal/slot model in your head everything is a breeze. Plus getting to prototyping in python is always fast!

For our use case, relative speed of the GUI isn't a factor. We've considered moving to electron just for ease of development, but python is winning out.

[1] http://wiki.ros.org/rqt

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What's the memory consumption of pyQT compared to electron apps?

For a JavaScript alternative to pyQT I recommend proton-native[1] - a React environment for cross platform native desktop apps.

1: https://github.com/kusti8/proton-native

I can't comment for pyQt. But the regular C++ Qt app I'm tinkering with at the moment uses 11MB private and about 50MB in shared memory for displaying a simple window with some nested widgets and scrollable lists.

for reference, the app I'm working on (https://ossia.io), a multiple-hundred-LOC Qt-based DAW with support for many network protocols and which uses most Qt libraries as well as boost uses itself 41 megabytes of RAM (private working set) and 70 megabytes total (working set) with a small document loaded, according to the windows task manager.

/me cries in electron

An order of magnitude lower. I see 40Mb on macos right now for a simple app.

I see a simple electron app using 140MB total. Measured by running 'free -m' before and after starting the app and waiting a while for a gc to run.

Measuring memory use is difficult.

FYI, you can open dev tools in electron and manually trigger GC [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/JbWArmR.png

I'm sure opending dev tools will increase memory use significantly though. So it's a bit self-defeating. :)

Perhaps there's some API to call instead.

I don't know off hand, and we never compared w/ Electron, it was just floated as an idea. When we eventually fully refactor our GUI code to be agnostic of ROS we'll profile more completely.

I'm presenting QGIS-ROS at ROSCon this year. It's a QGIS plugin for integrating real time robot data. Was relatively easy to do thanks to QGIS being Qt 5.

Felt exactly like making a RQT plugin.

Thank you for not using Electron.

All of our end users are internal, so the main bloat-related problems wouldn't really be an issue at all. Why should we be worried about electron in the future?

I have 3 "internal" tools in electron I need to have running all the time on my PC... It's a corporate dell mini PC, poor thing.

Electron is notorious for disregarding all platform conventions, being slow, and being a memory hog.

The worry is that you have too many developers who don't consider HTML/CSS/JS a proper stack for a "real" engineer and there refuses to learn it.

> even though the development time is obviously shorter with electron

Evidence? I think you're making a great point (about the reputation of html/css/js) but leave the unfounded claims out and your point would be stronger.

Obviously shorter to people who have done HTML/CSS/JS for some time, same with Qt/C++ or Qt/Python.

this. I was just about to write that the tutorial should be shown to every Electron developer.

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