You said electron sucked. That might be, but vidcutter, the subject of this thread, isn't proving your point. Just goes to show that who writes the code has more impact than the tech stack when it comes to such tools.
I don't know if all the numbers are accurate but it's true that vidcutter does weird things. I think it extracts ffmpeg to the temp directory on every start for whatever reason (it's not like it's a portable executable, it requires installation so why not extract it then?).
I can't explain why it uses more memory or how they managed to make it look alien despite using QT (so much for accusing electron of not looking native).
They are a direct response to the GP post's offhand quip about Electron. GP found the difference relevant, and I believe you're GP, but I am confused now given the change in interest.
My point is that startup time may not have anything to do with the GUI. It is not a good metric. I could write both an electron and pyQT app that takes minutes to start if it has other shit it needs to be doing. I haven't used electron in years but pyQT apps start up instantly, therefore this app must be doing something else.
If the two apps were programmed identically then you might have a comparison.
It uses PyQt. I'm not sure I'd put much money on it being faster than an Electron app. The only other PyQt app I have used is Cura and that is ridiculously slow. Takes like a minute to start up and you can watch it loading the controls when there are a lot of them.
Last time I tried VidCutter it was incredibly slow. So slow that it seemed completely glitched sometimes. It was such an incredibly slow and laggy chore to do anything in the app I could not keep using it.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I only care about the functionality and not whether the button should have round edges or the background having the right shade of grey. The consistent "feel" is nice to have (cough winform/wpf/uwp cough), but I would take "web-ish" applications over no application/crappy native application anytime (especially with Linux)
Native's not crappy, it's the best and most supported. We just happen to be in love with the web aesthetic and cross-platform. And that decisionmaking is mostly made by MBAs who see tech as a means to a financial end and not for the joy of writing good code
Web shit is fucking ugly, it eschews platform native conventions, and it just feels cheap.
But when I load up a winforms-esque app with toolbars and a statusbar and all the nice accoutrements we're accustomed too behaving in the way we are accustomed to... now I feel like I'm going to get shit done.
Literally the only electron app that feels serious is VSCode and the amount of optimizing MS has had to do has cut into seven figures
Here's a comparison of both apps with the same video file open and the same clip cut:
Startup time (time between double click and window appears and ready):
- Losslesscut: 2 seconds
- VidCutter: 12 seconds
Time to load the video file:
- Losslesscut: 1 second (to be fair it doesn't show thumbnails)
- VidCutter: 3 seconds
Memory usage:
- Losslesscut: 368MB
- VidCutter: 455MB
Idle CPU usage:
- Losslesscut: 0%
- VidCutter: 0%
Network requests:
- Losslesscut: 7
- VidCutter: 0
Installed size:
- Losslesscut: 455MB
- VidCutter: 178MB
Source, kinda (the memory shown is the sum of all subprocesses. taken when idle so no ffmpeg subprocess included.):
https://imgur.com/a/DwrNdxT