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Comment by ProfessorZoom | Hacker News Reader

e-e-e-electron... for this..

Ah yes, cause what's better than building a real, working MVP? Learning Rust for half a year just so you can 'optimize' the f out of an app that does two REST calls.

To be fair, this does sound like the kind of app that would benefit from being able to launch instantly, and potentially registering with the OS as a service in a way that cross-platform frameworks like Electron cannot easily accommodate. But Rust would not be the easiest choice to avoid those limitations.

I don't know man. I'm new to development, it's what I chose, probably don't know any better. Tell me what you would have chosen instead?

electron's a really nice option, specially for people that aren't interested in porting their apps or spending too much time on development

this is a macOS specific app it seems - if you want better performance and more integration with the OS, i'd recommend using swift

Time to learn learn Swift in the next project then! Thank you for the deets.

The good news is you already have a tool to help you with inevitable XCode issues. grin

Don't mind them—there's a certain subset of HN that is upset that web tech has taken over the world. There are some legitimate gripes about the performance of some electron apps, but with some people those have turned into compulsive shallow dismissals of any web app that they believe could have been native.

There's nothing wrong with using web tech to build things! It's often easier, the documentation is more comprehensive, and if you ever wanted to make it cross-platform election makes it trivial.

If you were working for a company it might be worth considering the trade-offs—do you need to support Macs with less RAM?—but for a side project that's for yourself and maybe some friends, just do what works for you!

Thank you for the explanation! At the end of the day, I'm a newbie and I'm in it to learn something new with each project. Next time I'll probably try my hand at a different framework.

I just watched a video about building a startup. One of the key points was to use what you know to get an MVP. Don't fret over which language or library to use (unless the goal is to learn a new framework). Just get building. I may not be a pro dev, but there is one thing I have learned over the years from hanging out amongst all of you. And that is, it doesnt matter if you are using emacs or vim, tabs vs spaces, or Java vs Python, the end product after all is what matters at the end of the day. Code can always be refactored.

Good luck in your development journey.

ignore the naysayers; nice job building out your idea

Thank you! I got pretty thick skin, but always a bit of insecurity involved in doing something the first time -- first public GH repo and Show HN :D

I think the parent comment is a shallow dismissal, but since you're asking, I would have built in SwiftUI

What's important is to get an product out there. Nobody cares what stack you use. just us geeks. don't get discouraged. you did well :)

My two cents: I think you made a good, practical choice. If you're happy with Electron, I'd say stick with it, especially if you have cross-platform plans in the future.

If you want to niche down into a more macOS specific app, you could learn AppKit and SwiftUI and build a fully native macOS app.

If you want to stay cross-platform, but you're not happy with Electron, then it might be worth checking out Tauri. It provides a JavaScript-based API to display native UI components, but without packaging a V8 runtime with your app bundle. Instead, it uses a native JavaScript host e.g. on macOS it uses WebKit, so it significantly reduces the download size of your app.

In terms of developing this into a product, on one hand it seems like deep integration with the host OS is the best way to build a "moat", but then again, Apple could release their own version and quickly blow a product like that out of the water.

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