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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

Webviews can't access the V8 engine, have different implementations on every platform, and are worse in performance.

As a business would you save 120MB in filesize, or thousands of hours in development time?

Electron isn't even unique in this. Blender is over 200MB now. Photoshop and Autodesk products have been big for a long time.

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I'm still getting my head around electron development, but only the main process in electron is really supposed to access the V8 engine right (if you turn sandboxing on anyways). With sandboxing on, you're still doing IPC from your render context to some backend, where for webview would be whatever framework is using the webview right?

Is the V8 performance benefit really that high compared to something like C# just calling system calls?

I’d assume it’s more about the tooling and libraries for JS. If I want to build an HTML based UI, I have thousands of JavaScript libraries alongside thousands of developers who know how to use them. If I want to build HTML that calls into C# I’ll need to do a lot more work myself.

Blender includes art assets like HDR cubemaps.

And so so so much functionality. Video editor, modeler, several renderers, image editor, python text editor, sculpt software, importer, video audio mixer, compositor, graph editor, scripting engine, .. monkey model. So much functionality comparing it with irc clients is not fair.

I would ship a daemon/service that makes use of the user installed browser, if a Web interface must be.

And you would then be back to debugging small intricate differences across browsers, which is what people ship Electron to avoid.

Since I don't want to be part of Chrome marketing force, that is a very good thing to do.

Either go native or Web standards.

That's nice technically, but awful in terms of usability.

Only if the developer doesn't know any better.

It can replicate Electron UI/UX without the bloat or Chrome marketing.

Why?

Would WASM solve the performance issue? One can imagine writing a webview GUI in a compiled language in order to get the speed and size benefits.

No, that would be worse actually. Imagine a circumstance where you need to use a library to fetch some network data that you can't do in a browser. Now you have to import the whole data stream via text serialize/deseralize into the browsers sandbox.

Wasm is also quite slower and bulkier because you'd have to compile your entire runtime into wasm, and then have it in the browser.

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