Electron isn't Cancer but it is a Symptom of a Disease | Hacker News Reader

Electron isn't Cancer but it is a Symptom of a Disease

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37 pointslinguae10 comments

Yes, Electron has a huge amount of problems (bundle size, speed, feeling, native APIs..) but all are solvable.

With a right approach, some Webassembly improvements and Webkit iterations all could vanish.

On the end of the day, Slack and Visual Code Studio are great apps from the user perspective while features, design and business model play much important roles in choosing the software compared to the underline tech stack.

Some users may think Slack and VS Code are great apps. I sure don't.

It's not great, but every irc client I used is dramatically worse.

Vs code is a good editor. Not exceptional, but good.

I'd also argue that the need to feel "integrated in the o. s." is actually relevant only for a small subset of apps, anything that's used full screen doesn't need any of that and it's better served by creating its own "mini universe"

> are genuinely better than native applications because they prioritize other things than responsiveness, performance, resource utilization, and unsurprising behavior.

Depends on how you define unsurprising behaviour. I use both Mac and PC for various purposes. It is very nice to have the same user interface across both. I was developing a Word Add-In at one point and a major annoyance was relearning how Word worked on Mac.

Absolutely this. I switch between Android, Linux and Windows daily, and UX consistency is more important than "nativeness".

It seems to me that the only people that really make a fuss about this are Apple-only folks ( macOS+iOS).

"Cancer", "Symptom of a disease" - from the headline one can assume that there wouldn't be any original content in TFA.

Add: I find this level of click-baiting unfit for HN's audience.

It’s a low effort article rehashing old and tired arguments. Exactly as one would expect from the title indeed.

Why don't they write in JavaFX? Those are faster than JavaScript, cross-platform from the roots, but if you want even faster startup, it's compillable with GraalVM. I've heard it does mobile as well with Gluon, but haven't tried.

Or Swing! Swing could look native without much effort.

They're easy to shit out and allows developers to punish their userbase for coming up with insane requirements.

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