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Comment by notastartup | Hacker News Reader

So my question is what's your rationale for using Thrust vs. Node-webkit?

Node-Webkit is hacky at best. Atom-Shell is a major improvement on Node-Webkit, however not quite there. Native modules need to be compiled for a completely different target.

Thrust takes it a step further, improving on the past. Thrust uses the same backing library as Atom-Shell (brightray) to expose the Chromium Content Library.

Thrust is cross-platform cross-language. Use a similar familiar api from any language you want, or roll your own. No need to use javascript on the backend if you dont want to.

For example, Go-Thrust can compile, this is a particular advantage for distributing applications.

Now to add some more context, Thrust's predecessor (ExoBrowser) still used embedded NodeJS, this made it incredibly difficult to package native modules with applications. The Thrust team learned from the mistakes of the past and decided to try to simplify the stack as much as possible to allow true composability.

does this mean that I can import other python modules directly in to the thrust app?

Essentially yes, you can import python modules into go-python and expose their API's via WebSockets to Javascript.

Could one write a fast text editor using Thrust? Can one use C++ instead of Python/JS/Go?

One could use c++ instead of Python/JS/Go, I would however recommend still using the JSONRpc bridge to communicate. I would not recommend using c/c++ at all, as Atom.io has proven more modern garbage collected languages have become so incredibly fast that c/c++ are primarily distractions unless you are a master of the incredibly huge ecosystem and can sling code together fast without having leaks, pointer issues, and a host of other security issues.

At a minimum, I would recommend using Go or NodeJS with a C binding for any extremely low level operations you would like to achieve, that would make everything much more suitable, you would also benefit of the ecosystem of modules.

Agreed, though I'm sure Atom doesn't steal more users from Sublime Text (C++ & Python for the plugins) due to its so-so performance.

It can be binded in C++ yes

Distribution through npm directly. X-language also.

Make sense?

Additionaly it's much easier to use native modules! No recompile needed

I'm curious about this. How are native modules compiled if I want to deploy from my architecture X to windows, os x and linux?

Well it's handled by Node directly right?

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