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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

What M1 giveth, Electron taketh away. Sigh.

If only the issue was limited to Electron... I often feel like Electron is more a declaration of defeat, like: hey no matter where you look at, software bloat keeps eating the precious advances in power provided by hardware. So let's at least get some comfort and value out of that. (Electron does put multiplatform desktop development within reach of 100x more developers than Qt/etc)

I installed windows NT in a virtual machine for kicks a few months back. Then installed office 97 on it.

If you do that and open slack immediately afterwards it feels painful instantly. The difference in how it feels is quite scary.

Partly we can thank this to the "throw more hardware at it" mentality and "lowering the barrier to entry" where noobs create the stuff a lot of us use. People can say all they want that it is good to lower the barrier entry, but that comes with a price. The price that others have to pay when we use their crapware. As long as it is not mandatory though, it is fine, but when it becomes mandatory, it becomes an issue.

Its your choice to use others "crapware". The price it comes with is all the abuse "noobs" have to take for offering their solutions for free. You don't like HTML frontends, thats sweet, then make your own alternative with Qt or winforms.

There is NO "mandatory" electron apps... But there is some great software made with electron that has become very popular.

I am confident if something has been made with electron, there is native alternatives out there. Don't like slack? Then use IRC.

Don't like my joystick to keyboard/mouse remapper with an electron frontend? Then don't, use one of the many alternatives (Too bad if they don't provide what you are looking for and no one of them seems to be able to modulate output in order to emulate analog controls. But at least it was written by a pro!)

I mentioned in my last sentence that as long as it is not mandatory, it is OK, but there are cases where it is mandatory, e.g. at the workplace.

I do not use Slack. I use self-hosted Mattermost as a replacement of Slack, I use IRC, and I use Element (formerly known as Riot.im).

Well, you will never get around being forced to use something in your workplace. I would never use Cisco VPNs but I had to install their shitty client in every workplace I ever been on.

> I am confident if something has been made with electron, there is native alternatives out there. Don't like slack? Then use IRC.

That only works if you can control what others use (maybe not in the case of Slack, but that's the exception as messengers go).

>Partly we can thank this to the "throw more hardware at it" mentality and "lowering the barrier to entry" where noobs create the stuff a lot of us use.

What people don't understand is that it's not a "mentality", it's an economic imperative.

It makes sense, business wise, to "throw more hardware at it", and "lowering the barrier to entry" obviously also means that somebody can develop something with lower costs/faster time to market.

It's not a question of spoiled devs.

It's a question of savvy business people.

People not understanding this don't understand how economics works.

As someone who switches between Windows and macOS, I'd rather every app I use be Electron and available on both OS than native and only available on one.

Native does basically nothing for me that matters when it comes to accomplishing things. Just OS lock-in. Loading a little faster or being a little snappier is a small consolation.

Wel native is important for me.

Some people don’t care about coffee, caffeine and brown slop is good enough.

Some people do care. I feel the difference in native and it’s worth it for apps you spend lots of time in.

Electron and Qt are not in the same league.

> Electron and Qt are not in the same league.

No, they're certainly not. Qt takes a lot of effort to produce apps that look like garbage on every OS while Electron takes no effort to produce apps that look great everywhere. VLC Media Player - arguably the most popular Qt app - looks like dog shit.

Qt will have you coding in an old shitty programming language or using duct-tape and glue to bind it to a more popular language while Electron will have you coding in the most popular programming language and getting things done in a fraction of the time.

Qt is register-ware that is moving closer to being closed-source while Electron is 100% open source.

As much as the community like to complain about it, I find that the popularity of Electron has been a real saver for Linux on the desktop. It finally has all the major applications available, often officially supported. Yes it's slow, but at least it's there.

I'm excited about Tauri: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

There are tons of supposedly lighter weight electron alternatives. Why are they not more popular?

Corporate backed marketing and geographically centralized mindshare.

>Tauri apps currently leverages Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and MSHTML (IE10/11) or Webkit via Edge on Windows

This is why, the devs who settle for Electron more often than not are not interested in doing cross browser support either.

" (Electron does put multiplatform desktop development within reach of 100x more developers than Qt/etc)"

This! The old joke of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping for Emacs is not relevant today any more. Same will happen with Electron, developer productivity will trump anything.

Hardware improves a lot more slowly than it used to be.

This is a very good point!

s/productivity/laziness/

I think it just comes down to economics. For the cost of a developer day-rate you can buy extremely powerful hardware. So which resource do you want to conserve - your developer time or your hardware resources?

Especially the fact that the “hardware resources” isn’t even your cost it’s your customers cost.

Hang on, I use Visual Studio Code daily and it’s really fast? Certainly compared to XCode or Jet Brains IDEs.

That's something I wonder too. What VS Code does right that, let's say Slack, fails on?

Delay loading everything until needed

Slack is a messy one page app developed by PHP programmers and vscode is open source and actually made by competent people.

And I suppose Facebook is therefore also developed by incompetent PHP programmers despite being one of the largest technology companies in the world?

Yes. I am not even joking. Facebook was so terrible that they had to literally reinvent their wheels (hiphop). Its not hard to become a large company when you have black budget backing as confirmed by Snowden.

Your own sentence argues against itself: the team that built HHVM certainly are not "terrible PHP developers"...

You don't think its strange that facebook hired PHP programmers to create the product and then have to hire competent people to fix that shit as far removed from company logic as possible?

Doesn't it kinda make you think, just a little?

I hope you are joking. Those people you call incompetent built arguably the best web application in the world propelling itself into a global corporate juggernaut and that qualifies as built by incompetent people?

The hubris is frightening.

Slack is really weird. It seems like they would have the resources to do native applications. I can't fault anyone for doing an Electron app as a demo, prototype, MVP, that's seems completely reasonable.

What I don't get is why they don't want to make a native macOS client, or Windows client. For Linux I get that they don't necessarily know if it should be GTK, QT, should they adopt KDE standards or Gnome, something else maybe? I can see why they would like Electron in that case.

For something like the Mac... They could do a fantastic client, it would use very little memory, play nice with the OS and be fast. Their users would notice and love it.

Especially considering they already have a good iOS Client with their iPad app!

People could perhaps already use that on the M1 Macs and have a better experience.

Maybe it's easy to sell the "One codebase on all platform" idea to the managers and hard to justify the need for high quality app? People are using it anyway.

They have to build and maintain the web version regardless. Why also write individual clients for Windows, Mac and Linux when they can simply wrap the website in a thin desktop wrapper and call it a day?

Because they care about the user experience and delivering the best possible product to their customers? Maybe not.

Based on their success, that's exactly what they are already doing, presumably thanks to the choices they are making.

Parts are written in C/++ no?

Nope.

The file search uses `ripgrep` which is written in Rust. But that is it as far as I know.

Yeah I've also tried to understand this. Tried looking for blog posts on what VS Code is doing but couldn't find one. Can someone point out if there's any?

One thing is that they rely on DOM reflow - the automatic, dynamic sizing of elements - as little as possible: nearly everything in the VSCode UI has a fixed size and position. Reflow is arguably the most costly feature of the web when it comes to dynamic apps (though also one of its most valuable features).

Slack allows my colleagues to chock it full of multi-megabyte animated gifs and cat images, but VSCode so far doesn't.

I'm not surprised that Slack's memory use tends to explode.

Apples to oranges comparison. VS Code is a text editor whereas Xcode and Jetbrains are IDEs. The real comparison should be with Sublime Text vs VS Code. Sublime Text blows VSCode out of water while opening the same project folder.

Here's a naive comparison

    ~/workspace/iOS Project(develop)
     time subl .
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in   75.46 millis    fish           external
       usr time   21.45 millis  106.00 micros   21.34 millis
       sys time   14.84 millis  659.00 micros   14.18 millis
    
    
    ~/workspace/iOS Project(develop)
     time code .
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in    4.18 secs   fish           external
       usr time  123.39 millis   99.00 micros  123.29 millis
       sys time  175.07 millis  585.00 micros  174.49 millis

That's not a fair comparison either. VSCode does way more than Sublime Text. I actually found VSCode closer to Intellij than to Sublime Text.

How is VSCode anything similar to IntelliJ other than they both can edit text and has plugins?

VSCode language plugins allow you to get autocomplete, go to definition, refactor support, debugging tools, etc.

Closer to IntelliJ than to Sublime, in my experience.

But such plugins exist for Sublime, too. Especially since the Language Server Protocol has been implemented.

Plugins on VSCode are a whole order of magnitude better than on Sublime, mainly because Sublime's Python API is not great.

Is there something remotely comparable to VSCode's debugger view on Sublime for instance?

I cannot tell if this comment is sarcasm or not.

Which features of IntelliJ is VSCode lacking?

IntelliJ is very slow so that's no surprise.

It's not really and apples to oranges comparison.

With the C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions installed, VSCode is an IDE that provides pretty much the same features as Xcode (for some features Xcode is ahead, and for others VSCode).

XCode needs about 12 seconds to start into a C/C++ project (on my mid-2014 13"MBP), while VSCode needs 3 (and yes I start into both fairly frequently from the command line). When actually working in the IDEs, for some things XCode feels slicker, for others VSCode. All in all, XCode really isn't a good argument in the whole "Electron vs Native debate" (and the same is true for VSCode vs Visual Studio btw).

Visual Studio Code is fast on startup and that's it. It chokes on million LOC project while Eclipse and Intellij work fine.

I use it daily on multi-million LOC projects and it's just fine...

Out of interest, what language are your projects written in? I've had to work on C# .NET codebases of that size and have had the same issues as the previous response.

VSCode itself doesn't fall over, but code completion and error highlighting are painfully slow to catch up and several of the extensions that provide that functionality regularly crash out.

Python — sad to hear that the C# tooling isn't great on large codebases though :(

I work in multi-thousand LOC projects in TS in vscode. It lags.

It LAGS a lot. I work on Xcode Swift projects and the difference is amazing (and Xcode is quite crap). Auto-complete or sometimes just opening a file takes seconds. (I know my project has a bit more complexity that a normal react/node app, but still...)

Add some extensions to VSCode to get the same functionality you have in JetBrains, and open a workspace with dozens of repos. I'll wait while you reboot because you went OoM (I'm only being half obtuse here).

Indeed, can’t decide if I’m happy or sad to see this news.

The alternative is Rosetta mode. It's not like Slack is going to write a native app all of a sudden.

Maybe use an alternative that is native?

But you can use the iOS Slack app, which is native!

Maybe iOS Slack is available on M1? It is native.

While electron isn't exactly slow, you just said electron is now fast enough for you.

>What M1 giveth, Electron taketh away. Sigh.

Yes, but doesn't this also mean that an Apple Silicon-native Electron instantly makes all Electron apps that much faster on that architecture, as opposed to having individual authors update (or not) their apps?

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