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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

Old user here... I still don’t understand how Java failed at this. It was supposed to be the solution. You can, today, make cross platform, mostly native apps, with Java. But didn’t really become ubiquitous like we all thought.

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Combination of things really

  * Non-native look and feel. Personally I think this is the big one.
  * Applications/Applets took (take?) forever to boot. JIT takes a while to kick in.
  * High memory usage due to heap+reference memory model and GC model.
  * Latency spikes due to GC
  * Installing a JRE is cumbersome for users
  * Incompatible JRE versions are a pain for users

If I'm being perfectly honest, a lot of the problems people have with Electron were or are problems with JVM consumer applications.

And electron has a native look and feel?

Most of the electron apps have a very customized look and feel, and default to a website-ish look and feel. Maybe not native but at least users are used to it, and it's not as alien as Swing.

Wasn't Java problem a a branding issue? Java got a bad reputation of being slow and not looking native. Java apps looked like Java apps. Also, they were so slow that could actually tell when the garbage collector was working. by the time Java got fast it was too late. Even now, .Net guys that didn't bother getting to know Java after its first decade, usually say Java is slow. Something similar happens now with people who hasn't used JavaScript in 15 years saying it's not a real language, etc., etc.

Personally I got really burnt out by the number of times software written for Java wasn't compatible with a new release, causing me to dig up an old Java exe that I knew was insecure to be able to take my online class or what have you.

And yet nearly all the things that people complained about with Java are at least as bad with Electron. I've grown to hate developers because of this faddish nonsense and their ridiculous and arrogant belief that their time is worth more than everyone else's.

I think we have Apple to thank for that. JavaFX was compelling but alas all rich platforms were sufficiently moot when they killed Flash on mobile and locked iOS down.

You could have JavaFX apps on iOS - but you had to deal with the security model not allowing a JIT to run. The only JIT on iOS is the javascript engine (which runs out-of-process).

One reason must be JVM startup performance. It simply takes long to load.

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