[shampto3]

Articles complaining about electron pop up at least once every month. One thing I always see missing from them is a better idea.

The reason electron is prevalent in businesses nowadays is because it's easy to develop and deliver to customers. Apparently this comes with the price of performance loss.

Please, the next time you feel the need to use your time to write an article about how electron is "cancer", try spending a little bit of time brainstorming a better solution that still fits the bill.

[francisl]

As a full time web developer, I liked the idea of electron. Even if I dislike electron apps that I need to use at work (like slack memory glutton).

It gave me the impression that I can build desktop app faster by reusing my skills. When it was time to build some side project, I did them in electron.

Recently I decided to learn c#, for unity initially, but I decided to try xamarin. This change all my perceptions. Not only building the core was way more enjoyable that with js/babel/nameit. Prototyping the native interface was faster, and developing the final UI was also more productive. Not to mention the final product looked better.

Comparing developer productivity is hard, but based on my own experience, I would say that it would have taken twice the time on electron the finish the same app in the same time. Compare to my other similar electron project, it load faster, don’t use cpu cycle on idle and consume ¼ of memory.

Maybe there is better idea than xamarin, but at least is seems like a better idea than electron. Now I see more electron as a fast way to have a webapp on the desktop or a fad based excuse to not learn something new.

On the other hand, calling a "cancer" is quite absurd.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Depending on your needs, there are quite a few of them. For smaller or non-commercial projects, you can use the free version of Delphi. Creating a native desktop app is superfast. The downside is that if you need multiplatform support you need to pay. If you care about Windows, you can just use Visual Studio and one of the languages included.

If, however, you want a free tool to rapidly create multiplatform apps, I think the only real contender is Lazarus. It has some rough edges at places, but it works quite well, you can construct medium-complexity apps quite easily, and it's really fast.

[isaiahg]

I haven't tried them yet but I've heard good things about javafx and sciter. Sciter especially looks like a nice replacement for electron.

[AstralStorm]

JavaFX is a actually pretty terrible and underdeveloped. On and off development and relatively low availability still.

[megaman22]

Xamarin?

[shampto3]

Looks like a possible solution, I've never heard of it before. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

[scarface74]

Sure the solution is simple, spend the money and write a native app. It's not a new solution.