> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron
How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
Good enough beats perfect almost every time. The real fail is that the major desktop OSes have spent the last 20 years jockeying for a monopoly on how software is made on and distributed their platforms. Apple and MS (and even the Linux desktops to a lesser degree) want me to have to build and maintain completely separate apps for their platforms to unlock all of the capability in their GUI.
You know what I want as a user? I want to be able to buy Affinity Designer and run in on whatever device I have. I don't want to care about Mac, Windows, Linux Chromebook or whatever. I would love to have some real Adobe apps on Linux.
As a software developer, it's about time that we stop having the native vs. whatever universal GUI layer debate, too. I've never seen a single ticket for an Electron app where the user was reporting that my app wasn't MacOS-y or Windows-y enough. I have seen plenty of tickets with native apps where something isn't right with the clipboard, print menu or or some component wouldn't correctly embed on a paste.
Any semi-modern PC has no problem running Electron apps. Download sizes aren’t an issue with modern internet speeds. It doesn’t make sense to try to optimize for people with the slowest systems when everything is only getting faster.
I run more than two Electron apps at a time and everything is fine.
Unless you’re running ancient hardware with 4GB of RAM and trying to load up many intensive applications (Electron or otherwise) it’s not a problem. If anything gets “sluggish” then you’re probably swapping, but it’s difficult to actually reach that point with just two Electron apps.
Your users won't see your "write less code" crap and all your other "elegant" overengineered solutions that use 5 libraries for something that should be a trivial 10-line function. They'll see that your app is an unreliable resource hog that looks and feels like it's not from this world. And it's never finished. It's constantly updating but always broken one way or another. And they'll suck it up because there are no alternatives and most software these days is like this.
I'll do everything in my power to change this. It's my mission in this world. I want people to rediscover non-crappy software and have their minds blown by what modern computers can do when programmed by people who actually know what they're doing.
I also use Java for my backend because not having to manage memory manually is worth of the small performance tradeoff.
Do you realize that you are essentially running a supercomputer? And that this supercomputer is struglling to display even the simplest things? Slack's CPU usage shoots up to 20% of cpu to display a single animated reaction to a post. Run a few of those "shouldn't have trouble" in parallel, and suddenly a computer that can run a 4k next-gen Unreal shooter at 60fps struggles to even maintain cursor latency.
I mean, please do! I would be delighted about an efficient, cross-platform, cross-language, convenient GUI toolkit. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm tired of people complaining about Electron without offering an alternative that's superior along all relevant axes.
Just wanted to state that in other worlds, like C++, there exist tools like wxWidgets which provide cross platform GUI.
There are examples of the opposite, of course. IntelliJ IDEs, despite using modified Swing GUI, feel native-ish to me because Jetbrains put in enough effort to replicate macOS native behaviors.
You're confusing "I personally don't like X" with "the world is better off without X".
Why? :c The next best thing is Atom. And, tragically, Atom is way worse. (Believe me, I wanted it to win the hackable-lite-IDE war, but... it didn't.) I don't like Microsoft, but VS Code won. Although, technically, I use "Code - OSS", which is the no-proprietary-code version.
I love Kate, although it's less configurable/powerful than Code/Atom, but it's Linux-only.
As to vim, I use it for quick things, but I'm not hardcore enough to feel comfortable with editing in a terminal and having to re-memorize how to highlight and copy-paste text.
I think it's more likely that they are evaluating the engineering decision by different criteria than you do. The people in most organizations that make the Slack buying decision probably don't know what Electron is. And frankly, Electron Slack works just fine on any modern Windows/Mac business laptop I've used it on.
Those "insanely complex apps" are... nothing but virtual lists with text and some images. You know that even first-year comp-sci students are given harder tasks?