alt Hacker NewsYou 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.
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And you missed totally the point on this
> They're a huge company, they can afford to do it native!"
They are an AI company, the AI could let it write native
Devs having no time is an obsolete argument
> most actual customers have more RAM than they need anyway,
Screw the rest and if every app is an electron app that’s not true at all. It works if few apps are Electron apps
> and you can still call out to native code for the perf sensitive part
What is rarely done
It’s just another reason why computer get faster and faster but apps don’t.
Thanks to electron apps I can type faster than the program reacts and sometimes it even misses a key.
Did never happen on a desktop app
The age question was bit of an overreach on my part, sorry about that, I felt like you were one of those new developers who only ever had high end macbooks. You are right about the economics side and I don't hate electron in particular. Just the general state of the industry. Even native is incredibly slow nowadays while spending 1000x more cycles. It's crazy.