alt Hacker NewsNah, some developers are lazy, that is all, lets not dance around the bush with that one.
Most of those Electron folks would not manage to even write C applications on an Amiga, use Delphi, VB, or whatever.
Educated on node and do not know anything else.
Even doing a TUI seems like a revelation to current generations, something quite mudane and quite common on 1980's text based computing of Turbo Vision, Clipper and curses.
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They wrote a React TUI renderer, that’s what they did. Shame…
I understand why, but there is such beauty in the simplicity of ansi.
At least it seems like a lot more apps are cross-platform than before. I wouldn't call the native devs lazy for not making a Mac version of their Windows app.
Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.
And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)
You mean writing simplistic forms so full of side effects they need to be written in a "native" framework? Sounds like good engineering.
The article concludes with
> The real problem is a lack of care. And the slop; you can build it with any stack.
so you agree.
Do you think that writing Delphi, a language no one is buying, makes you hardworking?
Go replace discord, slack, and vscode natively then. If everyone is crying out for the superior missing and obviously better alternative then that's a great opportunity.
This is such a lazy take.
Electron is very easy to deliver a good quality app for everything but absolute power users.
Yes it's horribly slow but it enables rapid experimentation and it's easy to deliver the wide range of UI integrations you are likely to want in a chat-esq experience.
In an age where LLM's start writing applications why would this matter?
I've programmed in every native Windows GUI starting with MFC. Used Delphi too. I've even created MS-DOS TUI apps using Turbo Vision.
Compared to the web stack and Electron, native GUI APIs are complete shit. Both for the programmer, but also for the user.
Reactive UI (in the sense of React, Vue, ...), the greatest innovation in UI programming ever, was made popular by web-people.
Unless you write some ultra-high performance app like a Browser, a CAD app, a music production app, it doesn't make any sense to use native GUIs. Takes longer to program, the result is uglier and with less features. And for those ultra high performance apps you don't use the native UI toolkit anyway, you program your own widgets since the native ones are dog shit and slow.
> Even doing a TUI seems like a revelation to current generations
Ironic statement, given that Claude Code is exactly that.
So maybe Claude could have used another cross-platform desktop development framework, but Electron was better/faster.
Let's assume for the moment the developers are doing about the best they can for the goals they're given. The slowness is a product decision, not an engineering problem. They are swimming in cash and could write a check to solve the problem if they cared. Evidence is they have other priorities.