[electroner]

In this thread you'll find many native app developers who are dismissing Electron because they feel threatened.

Cross platform apps are the future. Each day I run at least three Electron apps simultaneously and have no problem whatsoever. You have to be paying close attention to notice, and the reality is that most people do not care.

In fact, I was so intrigued by Electron, that I started developing my own app. So far the experience has been pure bliss.

[lol768]

> In this thread you'll find many native app developers who are dismissing Electron because they feel threatened.

That's an interesting claim to make, what makes you think that a lot of those who are upset by this decision are not just users who have tried Electron applications and found the UX poor? Why are they feeling 'threatened' and not just frustrated with this growing trend?

I'm not a native app developer in the slightest sense, I do mostly web work (server-side MVC mostly, but also a lot of frontend work) and enjoy working on security related to that.

[electroner]

Poor UX is an implementation problem, not an Electron problem. The popularity of well-built apps like Slack, Atom, and VSCode would seem to indicate many, many people have no problem with the UX.

[joeblau]

> You have to be paying close attention to notice, and the reality is that most people do not care.

You're right, most people don't care. But this app isn't targeted at "most people" it's targeted at developers. Developers do care about things like CPU's running at 100% while idle, memory pressure and apps crashing because they can't open a 1GB file.

[amcca029]

I think its a generational thing. Im 26 years old. Portability is extremely valuable to me, I use different operating systems constantly. Older devs may see portability as being less important if they spent most of their working lives in one environment. That being said, im still trying to learn, so there are valid points to take away from on both sides of the issue.

[royjacobs]

Cross platform apps are not the future. They've been here for a long time in the form of, say, C++/Qt.

The backlash is because, unlike C++, the Electron apps take huge amounts of memory and CPU to perform the simplest tasks.

For some developers Electron might be a step forward, but for end-user usability it's definitely a big step back.

[cr0sh]

> the Electron apps take huge amounts of memory and CPU to perform the simplest tasks.

I'm not going to dispute this, as I've seen it myself; Electron apps can be huge hogs.

So - why not fix them? What is the problem with Electron that causes this? What is the problem with the apps themselves that cause this? Is there an underlying API or something causing all the problems, or is it a death by a thousand cuts kind of issue? Is it the underlying browser instance?

Whatever it is, whether one thing or many, those are the things needing fixed. Don't like them? Then fix them where you can; it's open source after all. Find the problem, fix it, submit a pull request.

I understand (myself included) - "I don't have the time!" - nobody really does, I guess - so maybe we need to make the time? Even if it is just to isolate the issue, that could go a long way towards the solution.

Instead of bitching about this issue, let's help fix the problem. Where Electon seems to shine, above and beyond say, "C++/QT" - is that it has real traction. It's a single ecosystem that leverages stuff a lot of people already know. More people know web technologies than know C++/Qt (ok - citation needed and all that - but I'm pretty certain it's true). It's also (probably?) cheaper to higher them. So companies do that.

While it would be great if our web ecosystem were composed of C++, Qt, etc - it isn't, and it isn't likely to change. Companies want stuff fast, they want stuff cheap. Most people don't care if things are bloated or slow, or what they are written in, as long as they work (this has been the truth forever, of course).

So we might as well get used to it - and try to make it better. In the long run, it will only help us.

[pikzen]

>Created 18 minutes ago

I didn't know 'open source project shill' was an occupation. I'm feeling audacious, I'll bite.

You run three electron apps simultaneously and don't care, but your users are not running on heptacore 16GB RAM machines. They care, a hell of a lot.

Hell, even I with an heptacore and 16GB RAM care when Electron apps appropriate two full cores to render shit a CPU from 15 years ago could have done with native technologies.

[casiotone]

I run the following browser-based apps, concurrently, every day:

Atom (electron), Discord (electron), Spotify (electron-like), App Store (webkit), Steam (webkit), Safari, Chrome.

I have all of these running, without a single problem. Performance is great. I don't need a "heptacore 16GB RAM machine" to do it - I run all of this on a 2016 Retina MacBook. The 8GB RAM, 1.2GHz dual core Intel M5, passively cooled ultrabook.

So, what was it you were saying again?

[pikzen]

>Atom (electron)

50% CPU by staying idle.

>Discord (electron)

Does better, only uses one full core, 25% CPU!

> Spotify (electron-like)

Actually one that doesn't decide my cores belong to it, thankfully.

>webkit derivatives

Steam notwithstanding because only parts of it are webkit and is uses CEF, these are not wrappers around chrome repurposed.

>I run all of this on a 2016 Retina MacBook. The 8GB RAM, 1.2GHz dual core Intel M5, passively cooled ultrabook.

It's almost as if you were running on the same hardware as these people develop it on and care about when they dirnk their lattes in a Starbucks.