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Comment by UglyToad | Hacker News Reader

> the very choice of using Electron itself is usually an act of not caring.

Hmm, not sure I buy this, sure it's not as fast as going native on every platform. But let's be honest the alternative isn't 3-4 native applications built with care for each special little subgroup. It's a MacOS only app in the US market or a Windows only app everywhere else.

Businesses don't have an unlimited amount of money to spend addressing every tiny market so I'd say the complainer's focus should be on building a better X-plat story if they really care rather than whinging that some application isn't built to make the most of the 0.1% of the addressable market they find themselves in.

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Electron alternatives aren't platform specific, they're other xplat toolkits like JavaFX, Swing, WxWidgets, Qt, JUCE, Flutter...

Of those, Qt is the only one with acceptable performance and ootb visuals.

Here is a Java/C++ audio workstation software,

https://www.bitwig.com

And here is a must read book to do great UIs in Swing,

http://filthyrichclients.org

Here are examples of Java applications based on Microsoft's Fluent UI design,

https://www.pixelduke.com/java-javafx-theme-jmetro/

Performance is fine on all of these compared to Electron. Every non-native toolkit needs a lot of work to look good. But it's usually less work than native on every target.

Swing is hardly slower than Electron.

And what's unacceptable about wxWidgets performance?

Unless you need to run on mobile, Qt is the answer.

That’s the dream, and it stays a dream most of the time. Business concerns pop up again when it comes to building out teams for Qt based desktop apps.

Electron comes with an enormous, deep, absolutely stupid big pool of web developers. I genuinely can’t emphasize enough how big it is, and how easy it is to hire from.

Montevideo, Montenegro, Monterrey, doesn’t matter. Hot, not particularly expensive developers are ready to churn out React UIs in your area!

> Electron comes with an enormous, deep, absolutely stupid big pool of web developers.

Looks at the web.

As Linus Torvalds put it, it's worth writing the whole thing in C for no other reason than to prevent those 'developers' from 'contributing' to it.

Qt runs like shit compared to Electron, and its license prices are way too expensive. Moreover it's C++ so a deprecated, unsafe, un-cool and uninteresting dying language no one wants to write anymore.

Really? Make a fully featured modern DE/WM/Compostor in electron that fits into 128MB of RAM and runs at 60fps on a Pentium III in daily usage then with a suite of apps.

Or better yet, make a web engine from scratch, that is, write the rendering engine, compositing engine and so on using Electron primitives.

Because both of these work very well when using Qt as a base, see LXQt and KHTML.

You do know very well that all of this is going to happen someday. Everything will be re-written in JS just because it's possible. And numbers will show that those solutions beat C++ in speed and resource usage, like VSCode does.

What does VS Code beat in speed and resource usage? Be fair and compare it to other software with only colourization, Git support and extension support.

JS can get close to C++ in speed but the same program in JS will always need more memory.

I doubt that. C++ programs have always tons and tons of memory leaks.

Which you can fix if you're competent. If we're looking at bad programs, JS programs are famous for importing 15MB+ of code for simple functions.

While using a runtime written in C++.....

In a few years or so, the runtime itself will be in JS. It's unavoidable, this is the way things are.

Until JavaScript has the language features to be able to bootstrap itself, that won't happen.

As long as JS is jitted/interpreted at runtime, I don't even know how that would work!!

Correction: LXQt uses Openbox (not Qt) for windowing, and offers a choice between no compositor (by default) or one like picom (not Qt) or KWin (Qt Quick, JS-based, I wish it wasn't JS-based but it's too late to change that).

Qt Quick is not based on JS. JS is merely an option for Qt Quick.

That must be why WinUI is written in C++, Metal uses C++ shaders, or CUDA hardware is designed according to C++ semantics, then.

Let's just wait for JS bindings for all these things and let's see what competent people will use. You already know the answer, do you? Yes, it'll be the JS bindings.

Someone has to write those bindings, and they won't live forever.

As per parent post, C++ it is not cool and hip anymore, so it won't keep CADT programmers interested long enough to get the work done.

Well, 99% of most programming languages fit that as well.

That's why according to the parent, everything is going to be rewritten in JS very soon! /rollseyes

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