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by sz4kerto 3738 days ago
> I honestly think that Electron is the future of desktop software

I like your software but this statement makes me sad -- it's really not a great situation where a desktop software is written in a language that's not exactly great (to say the least); it runs on the top of countless abstraction layers that make the product comparatively very slow. I have 20 CPU cores and 64G RAM, and Slack starts much slower (!) than MS Word 2016.
2 comments
grinich 3738 days ago
Thanks for the kind words!

If there's one thing consistent about software, it's that things always get faster. People had a similar sentiment about Java (sloowwwwww), and yet now the JVM is pretty amazing and powers a huge part of the world.

We know N1 isn't as fast as something written in C++, but we're not super worried about it because this is likely the slowest that N1 will ever be-- and yet lots of people are still using it every day! V8 and CPUs will continue to get faster and faster each year, and we'll also improve the codebase.

Our main objective was to make N1 easy to extend by today's developers. And (whether you agree with it philosophically or not) JavaScript is leading the way for the future of programming. So it's the right choice to use in this regard.

For reference, check out the NPM growth: http://imgur.com/R8UjESZ

(Also, I think React might be the biggest UI programming paradigm shift in like 15 years. Not specific to JavaScript, but we're also betting a huge amount around that vs. traditional MVC architecture.)

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grinich 3738 days ago
As an aside, I don't believe the Slack app is taking full advantage of ElectronJS. It's essentially still just a wrapped webapp. (They run the same version in the browser.)

Full ElectronJS apps can use something called ASAR which effectively creates a super efficient bundle for loading application code at launch. More here: https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/a...

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mchahn 3737 days ago
> Full ElectronJS apps can use something called ASAR

That was a major reason Atom went from unbearably slow to start to reasonable. I wonder if the Atom github people pushed the Electron github people to do this.

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13years 3738 days ago
WebAssembly and and Mozilla's Servo are innovations that will likely change that perception. Servo might even make web the preferred platform for performance.
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