alt Hacker NewsMay I ask how old you are? If you are not just naive, this should never be the attitude of someone building software. It's almost a cursed take.
Throughout history we've only gotten more efficient with our technology and it's resources. Software might be the only field where it went the opposite. Now we are insulting users on low end hardware?
The same thing I did well on a 2GB ram windows 7 machine is a latency nightmare on a 16GB windows 11. The same exact task with the same results.
Don't want to completely hate electron. VS Code proved it can be done in a good way, teams showed us the opposite. Like the author said you can build slop in any stack: JS or native it doesn't matter. What matters is care.
This entire industry is cursed with people who don't give a shit, in it for a quick buck, are entitled and lazy. Maybe AI should destroy everything anyway. We had better software when we gatekept who can build it.
You may ask, but given latest advancements in identifying people from trivial information, I'll be a bit cagey about it. I'll say I'm not 20 anymore. :)
I'm certainly not trying to be insulting, but these threads do get more than a bit tiresome. There's very little curiosity in them towards understanding why Electron is so popular; maybe a tendency lately of HN to assume that popular things are bad, or that large companies do things exclusively for the wrong reasons.
Efficiency is coming up a lot in this thread, and almost universally without definition, because the people making claims about it are implied to be measuring the efficiency of the same thing: how fast your software can run on the least possible hardware. But efficiency can also describe how you use time, which as they say is the one thing you can't ever have more of. Or money, which is also rarely infinite.
In this thread I see takes like:
- "They're a huge company, they can afford to do it native!" (or they can write it once across 3 OS and the browser, and spend the time on other things)
- "Electron has bad performance!" (non-native performance isn't the same thing as bad performance, using more RAM than you think it should consume isn't automatically bad performance)
- "The UI is inconsistent with native apps!" (take it up with product and design, remember Skype? Or AIM)
Electron isn't going to take over the bare-metal powerhouse app space anytime soon, but that's not why anyone builds anything with it. It saves dev time, it makes the economics of bothering to support Linux desktop users make sense, most actual customers have more RAM than they need anyway, and you can still call out to native code for the perf sensitive parts.
Like you and the article said it's about caring. There are definitely bad Electron apps. There are bad programmers at every level between the user and the metal. But the scapegoating on here is so predictable I could have predicted half the responses in this thread with my eyes closed given only the title of the article and some of them are borderline against the guidelines in how little they further discussion. I at least hoped my comment was funny, even if it didn't add much either.