Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghosty141 | Hacker News Reader

As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features.

The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far more skill and is a lot more quirky.

View on HN

People don't shit on electron in general, some tech people do. We know what our computers can do when optimally programmed and there they are wasting cycles on rendering badly built web apps. I believe we should be shitting on badly written apps: we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves: then we install some simple crappy app that is not even in the same universe complexity wise as vscode which someone burns 100x more memory and cpu. That we should shit on imho.

> we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves

yes, very much worse than the average Qt app in my experience in terms of responsivity, load time and general UI performance

Agreed. I always shudder when colleagues recommend it. Last I checked it took up an enormous amount of resources for an editor.

My VSCode takes considerably less RAM than Webstorm on the same project - and yet IMHO VSCode does it better.

I mean, "better than a bloated java app" is not really a compliment is it ? Every time I try to use jetbrains IDE I am just unable to given how slow everything feels, my hands start shaking from the stress in merely a few minutes

Well and what editor can you use that isn't either a bloated Electron app, a bloated Java app, or a bloated C++ app?

Comparison to its next best competitor is the only thing that makes sense IMHO.

No recent C++ IDE I know (Qt Creator, KDevelop mainly) has the kind of endemic UI slowness than the others have (recent VS in C#, Electron stuff, Java stuff).

Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, and measure all of the out of process executables that make part of the experience and then you will see how much RAM is actually being consumed.

I have like 30 extensions to give it the same level of functionality (or more precisely, the subsection I use), and it takes less than Webstorm.

Counting the external processes RAM usage?

Just measuring code.exe isn't enough.

Obviously native does better but people are not writing native apps and if we have to put up with that, it seems time to hold those packaged web apps to some basic standards. I rather have a QT app any day, but I do not work alone and picking software that my colleagues do not use is a continues fight. I worked in vim (with a bunch of plugins) only until begin of 2020 but working in a team just makes that painful in communication and working with some team members.

So I stopped somewhat shouting at the moon and only shouting at the even worse than bad stuff we use. Like chat clients that take up 3gb after running for a few days.

Be the change you want the world to be.

The only Electron app I use by option is VSCode due to its Rust support, and work stuff I don't have a say on what gets used.

And even so, if there is a Web alternative to the Electron package, it will run on a browser tab, done deal.

But it's also a self-sustaining cycle. Actually developing Applications with GTK is relatively straight-forward. I think UI development but esp. cross platform UI development also suffered a lot from fragmentation with both frameworks and languages. So chances finding good documentation for a chosen combination are low.

(And yes, using WPF or QT is ridiculously difficult despite having full-featured IDEs)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com