[Subsentient]

The company I work for hired several incompetent devs who wrote an abortion of an Electron client. It very nearly killed the company. I finally convinced the boss to let me rewrite it in Qt, and now our feedback is far, far more positive on the UX. Qt and GTK+ are one of those things that work "well enough" on the big three, especially Qt (GTK+ has serious theming issues on macOS), and it's hard to justify Electron as long as Qt or at least GTK+ exist.

Fuck Electron. I've seen what it can do to a product firsthand. If you get a competent web dev, it might work, but it will be slower than snail shit. Just write it in Qt. You don't need to use C++, Qt has bindings for many languages, including Python, Rust, JS with Qt Quick, and even Lua. Myself, I don't mind modern C++, though in many cases I prefer Rust.

[mbrodersen]

Your argument seems to be that bad developers write bad software? Isn’t that true no matter the platform? I have written equally successful software in both Electron and Qt. In my experience, a competent developer can write great software given almost any platform.

[Subsentient]

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost anything, sometimes to the point of obscenity. That was a big reason we were forced to ditch Electron, the WebKit bullshit was just too much for what we were trying to do. No matter how many bugs I fixed, it was still a bloated sack of shit. Qt was easy to write. Sure you had to put a few #ifdefs here and there, but for the mostpart, it was portable, easy, and Qt Creator saved us a ton of time compared to baking our own. If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays. That said, Qt and GTK+ provide so much better of a user experience with only slightly increased difficulty. It's hard to justify Electron.

[spuz]

> If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays

Could you elaborate on that? Isn't using the native GUI API of the OS a relatively sensible default, especially if you aren't targeting multiple OSes? If you definitely want cross-platform support, I can see the argument for choosing one of the cross-platform frameworks but I still don't think that means using the native GUI API is such a bad choice.

[mbrodersen]

Qt is a great choice for writing multi-platform desktop apps. It would take a lot longer, and add unnecessary complexity, to write the UI specifically for each platform.

[Subsentient]

I suppose for OS utilities targeting a specific platform only, that makes sense. But for portability, you sure as shit shouldn't be trying to write a custom GUI using the native OS GUI toolkit for all three platforms. It's surprising how many make this mistake. It's like they've never heard of Qt and are surprised development takes forever.

[mbrodersen]

The only problem I had with Electron was the slow booting time. Other than that it worked fine. I didn’t see any more bugs than I see on any other platform. Perhaps the problem was that you are very familiar with Qt and not with Electron? I am not saying that Electron is perfect. I don’t think any platform is. But it seems to me that (again) the problem you are describing is that bad developers will write bad code on any platform. And yes a lot of inexperienced developers know JavaScript so they are attracted to Electron and write bad code. Completely agree. But I think it is unfair to blame Electron for that. Just saying :)