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Comment by foobiekr | Hacker News Reader

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foobiekr·

The very few Java desktop applications I've been inflicted with have been terrible. Memory hogs, terrible UI, etc.

Maybe the time has simply passed?

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As opposed to electron apps which are thin memory users and paragons of UI

So much this. I understand that it's easiest to reuse your react skills to build your desktop application, but why does it have to consume so much memory? Is this something that's wrong with electron or rather the UI frameworks that run on it?

Problem is it’s turtles all the way down. A lot of turtles. Each turtle is hungry.

It is because every Electron app starts it's own Chromium instance.

Intellij is written in Swing. Yes on memory hog, no on terrible UI. It works quite well across platforms (I'm using the Windows and Mac version)

IntelliJ uses a ton of custom widgets and styles, and nowadays even a custom JVM build to look the way it does. And on Linux, fonts in IntelliJ are hit-and-miss in my experience.

I sure hope it uses tons of custom swing widgets.

That's something the Java team never got right: the cross-platform look&feels looked just awful.

Swing was always customisable. You didn't have to use an existing look and feel or built in components

Time has passed and more importantly Electron based apps lowered the expectations of desktop users.

I use dbeaver (https://dbeaver.io/) as my go-to database tool and it's absolutely fine. Not as snappy as native apps for sure, but between Spotify, Slack and VSCode I can't really complain. I used to... but not anymore.

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