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by vijaybritto 2044 days ago
Most of the hate towards electron is only because of its resource usage problems and not because of its capabilities. Vscode is it's testament for capabilities. Jetbrains suite is great but they're not resource efficient in any way!

If the JVM based apps do not yield a significant performance benefit then there is no point in going after that.

3 comments

It's not only resource usage, but performance in general. I can feel lagging when typing slowly in VSCode editor, even in plain text files without even trying autocomplete or any IDE feature. IntelliJ IDEA doesn't have any lag, Eclipse too, and both offer more IDE capabilities than VSCode.
The article covered another factor:

>The second is the DOM. It is a horrible collection of hacks that make simple things hard and hard things impossible. I have thought many times “if only was I drawing this control/layout directly, I would’ve finished hours ago.”

As a user of electron apps there are clearly limitations on what the UI can do as a result and the style of rendering it is clearly webish.

Another issue I keep on seeing with web based apps, moreso on android, is they seem utterly incapable of dealing with the slightest network non-connectivity. The UI tends to freeze.

I do take your point entirely on the fact that perhaps java's inherent performance limitations might result in a fairly comparable poor experience however.

And the DOM, and the size overhead and it's JS/TS and some other parts from dev (i.e. not user) perspective.

Through tbh. I don't see much reason to spend time for a Java UI framework, Java for desktop is just kinda annoying and somewhat even more dead then Java for servers (which isn't really dead tbh).

Through I guess idea/Intellij would love to replace the low level parts with something which works more reliable.

Yeah the reasons for choosing JS/TS don't have to be stated from developers' perspective because its the goto tool for new products nowadays.

Also I don't think the desktop app market for java is small in any way. But if there's no difference between electron and JVM UIs then there is no incentive for teams to switch.

But what about the teams coming from classical desktop application development. Perhaps they don't want to switch to Electron-based web development.