Why Electron Is a Necessary Evil

https://federicoterzi.com/blog/why-electron-is-a-necessary-evil/

by thevinter • 5 years ago

52 125 5 years ago

TekMol3• 5 years ago

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock for
    the past 5 years,chances are you have used
    an Electron-based application at least once
    in your life.

What does it mean to "live under a rock"?

I have never used an Electron app because all my needs are covered by termial applications, Firefox, LibreOffice and Gimp.

Which rock do I live under?

zarzavat• 5 years ago

Which rock do I live under?

Linux, apparently.

yepthatsreality• 5 years ago

None of the listed software is exclusive to Linux.

bern4444• 5 years ago

Some common and widely used electron applications are VSCode, Spotify, and Slack. I think Microsoft teams might also be electron based but I'm not sure. There are many more as well.

TekMol3• 5 years ago

Sure. But I don't use those.

OldTimeCoffee2• 5 years ago

I believe Teams just switched to Edge WebView instead of Electron. The point remains that native applications are starting to only be specialty applications like games, CAD/CAM, Creative Suite, etc where you need a lot of access to compute power.

hpb42• 5 years ago

Isn't Spotify for Linux in C++ with GTK?

    $ ldd /usr/bin/spotify | grep gtk
            libgtk-3.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-3.so.0 (0x00007f06b545d000)

How do I check if it is an electron app?

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

Keyword being "chances".

guilhas• 5 years ago

Exactly, a most electron apps work on the browser or have good non electron alternative

I have tried some but that's about it

caconym_4• 5 years ago

What does it mean to "live under a rock"?

"Living under a rock" is an idiom used to describe one who is/has been cut off from the mainstream.

Which rock do I live under?

The rock of literally never having used any of the ubiquitous communications tools built on Electron (Discord, Slack, Teams off the top of my head), or any of the very popular^[1] code editors built on it, or any of the countless other applications that use it.

I'm sure you get your work done just fine, and this is not a value judgment. It's just an observation that, at least in the set of people likely to read (or "read") this article, you are a member of a (presumably) small and ever-shrinking class. Electron is everywhere.

^[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

tylerscott2• 5 years ago

I would definitely recommend the author look at Flutter again now. The comment there was back in July. The desktop experience has greatly improved. I have been building out a desktop-first set of components and it's been a real joy to work with.

jmnicolas2• 5 years ago

Dart / Flutter lacks essential libraries: you can't do ssh / sftp on desktop for example.

As a side question, Do you parse JSON in your apps? If yes what package do you use? I tried built_value, I suspect the people that developed this really hate me personally ;)

tylerscott2• 5 years ago

For sure there are alot of things missing like you mention.

Another I find personally frustrating is so many libraries assume you are using the Material stack.

RE: JSON--I have used json_serializable in the past: https://pub.dev/packages/json_serializable. For my current project, I am using a data format I created call Traindown (https://traindown.com) and it's all local so I haven't hit JSON or SSH/SFTP issues personally.

Sorry I don't have a silver bullet suggestion for ya! I'm sure they don't hate you personally. Maybe all of us as collective "users" but not YOU! haha

datenarsch• 5 years ago

Sorry, but no. Electron is the absolute worst piece of technology that I have come across in at least the last 20 years. It's not only that it is bloated, ridiculously resource hungry and terribly inconsistent because every program has it's own set of UI controls, but it's also just absolutely plain terrible to work with:

The APIs are a complete mess, half of them are not working properly, things constantly get broken between even minor version revisions, the documentation is usually outdated and incorrect and you need to plaster your code with OS-specific if-else statements all over the place because many of Electron's APIs behave differently on different OSes. The whole thing is just a complete disaster.

barrenko• 5 years ago

Yes, just no.

spoils19• 5 years ago

Agreed completely. In terms of the absolute worst piece of technology, there have been no applications that have even been shipped successfully with it, and every developer who uses it is probably encountering some form of s=Stockholm syndrome, or they're inexperienced enough as developers to not see the value of native applications.

dhosek• 5 years ago

He talks about short-lived applications, but on my Mac, it's rare that I launch a new application. I have most of my apps running all the time.

pixelgeek3• 5 years ago

And I can't do that with any of the Electron apps that I use with the exception of Nota which just sits in the background not doing anything since it is a text editor.

If I keep Tabby open for too long it starts to spike the CPU and I suspect that this would be the case for any active Electron apps.

johnnyapol2• 5 years ago

My major annoyance with Electron is every app shipping its own version of it, particularly on Linux where most distros tend to ship electron in the repositories. I'd really rather not have 5 different chromium versions - that are lacking security updates - on my system. I wish packagers were more aggressive about not bundling them.

dmitrygr• 5 years ago

It is interesting that you say that. This is fact already exists. An unbundled version of electron, that can be used by multiple applications, is called a web browser. Applications using it are called websites (or PWAs if you must)

johnnyapol2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, certain applications are gimped if you don't use the electron version. A notable example of this for me is Discord where push-to-talk doesn't function in the web version due to API limitations.

Another app I use that has this problem is Spotify. While it isn't electron, it is using CEF (chromium embedded framework) and can be dynamically linked to a distro one with some effort. Using the web version means I dont have my music available offline for listening.

hs86• 5 years ago

Especially, most of these chat apps have functionally similar web/PWA apps. In those cases, I prefer to install them as desktop PWAs or use Chrome's "Create shortcut" feature to get them into my Dock/Taskbar.

One little bonus is that my browser extensions also apply to these installed PWAs. For example, the Todoist PWA now shows me the Toggle icon next to each task as an easy shortcut to start the time tracker.

In my case, I have these running as Chrome PWAs:

  - Raindrop.io
  - Grammarly Editor
  - Todoist
  - Discord
  - Element
  - Whatsapp
  - Twitter

And these are still running as regular Electron/CEF apps:

  - 1Password
  - Obsidian
  - VSCode
  - Gitkraken
  - Slack
  - Spotify

Whenever the web alternative catches up with the Electron app, I move to the PWA. Probably the biggest drawback of this is that Firefox is not a suitable alternative for me anymore :( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202

jcun41282• 5 years ago

I can't believe the 32bit Spotify thing, I have had it happened to me a few times where it exceeded that 4GB threshold and I had to restart it.

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

If it didn't say "Electron" in the title, I'd have thought he was describing Java. I don't see why Electron itself is a necessary evil - Java has been able to do all of this (just as badly) for over 20 years.

dokka• 5 years ago

At least java is actually typesafe

cwdegidio• 5 years ago

And has a rather stable ecosystem. I've been doing front-end development for almost 10 years now and have started moving into more Java based projects recently and after living through the "flavor of the week" hellscape that is the JS community, I'll take Java's stability any day of the week. And I say this as someone who does actually love JavaScript.

criddell5• 5 years ago

Java is very lean compared to Electron.

JCWasmx865• 5 years ago

And you can often have only one JVM installed. (Maybe not the average user after the JRE was killed, but at least theoretically it is possible)

kache_• 5 years ago

The main computing constraint isn't the hardware that the software is running on, but is instead the wetware that creates the software

npm install --save electron

viktorcode2• 5 years ago

Fair points on downsides and upsides of using Electron in development. But there's huge gaping hole in this logic: the points are given from the perspective of software developers, not software users. Users, given the choice between native and Electron, would overwhelmingly choose the former.

Speaking as a user I don’t care about your production costs and your programming knowledge. I care about my experiences. That’s why many Electron-based programs are marketed to managers as “solutions”, not to the actual end users.

As a macOS user let me add to the list of complaints mentioned by the author. Despite having fully functioning native iOS apps, some companies will not allow installing those directly on M1 based Macs, nor would they produce a rather simple ports for macOS. They will insist for you to use Electron-based client, like everyone else does. Teams, Slack, Discord. So I do agree that at least in this case Electron is evil.

laurent123456• 5 years ago

Users, given the choice between native and Electron, would overwhelmingly choose the former.

They might choose the former but then what? I would too, as a user, but in practice as the article mentions the alternatives aren't yet that great. So quite often the user can choose between the Electron app... or nothing. Many users accept the drawbacks and in fact it's mostly developers or technical people in general who complain about Electron. Most users don't even know about any of this.

viktorcode2• 5 years ago

That's a great point. Choice is often between Electron or nothing. Why? Because even when they can afford it, software development corporations prefer to save money on the development. Even if they save peanuts, as in my example regarding apps on M1.

Obviously, this can exists only when there's no or minimum competition for the end users.

neoberg2• 5 years ago

As an end-user I love Electron because it allows products to evolve quicker and across all platforms. I would choose an Electron app (or if it runs in a browser, even better) over a native one.

Msw242• 5 years ago

If a user had to choose between a native app and their top 10 most anticipated features, which would they choose?

The_Colonel• 5 years ago

Users, given the choice between native and Electron, would overwhelmingly choose the former.

I think tech people tend to assume this way too much without having any kind of evidence.

I actually prefer electron apps. They usually have a nice looking, modern design and are more consistent with web where I spend most of the time anyway. I doubt I am alone in this.

zihotki• 5 years ago

Would you mind providing the sources for the claim that "would overhelmingly choose the former"? I'd love to read a report or study about that.

jcun41282• 5 years ago

I made a couple of basic CRUD apps with it and it was pretty cool. I could build a React app and then build the electron app based on React's build folder and it just works.

I'm still working on learning C++/something like QT but I was able to deploy an app to Win/Lin/App.

For reference

Cross platform CRUD app (desktop, Android RN app) https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/cross-platform-app

Basic news slider app but it was transparent https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/frameless-electron-news-re...

bluetidepro2• 5 years ago

I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities. At the end of the day, so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers.

I have played around with Electron in the past for fun "nothing" projects, and also tried to understand what many on HN would want as the "correct" way to build native apps. It's an indescribable difference how much easier Electron is to get up and running from my experience, as someone who primarily does front-end work.

Are there better ways to build native apps? Of course. Electron still solves a massive problem for many developers and end-users that I don't understand why so many here get on their high horse refusing to acknowledge. It's similar to PHP hate to me. Of course there are better languages to use, but things like WordPress using PHP are so much more approachable for so many developers.

smachiz4• 5 years ago

Because the worst abusers of Electron can afford to have dedicated teams for platforms.

Do you think Slack can't hire enough developers to build native platforms for Mac/Windows/Linux? Spotify? Discord?

I get it for small dev teams to build a cross platform app - but at a certain size, I don't understand why they can't go build native apps that aren't garbage.

plopz• 5 years ago

Didn't spotify used to have a native platform application?

bluetidepro2• 5 years ago

Correct, but I'm also not saying that isn't true? They aren't mutually exclusive. Electron can still be good/useful for many people, and companies like Spotify/Discord/Slack can still get criticized for not hiring devs to make dedicated teams to build native apps. Just because some companies are choosing the technology in ways people don't like, doesn't make the technology itself bad. I hardly ever see anyone phrase it that way, though. It's only "ELECTRON BAD", not "SLACK IS BAD FOR USING ELECTRON."

finiteseries• 5 years ago

I absolutely believe Slack can’t hire enough developers to build native platforms for Mac/Windows/Linux without hilariously extensive & expensive retraining.

Have you tried to hire developers with eg AppKit experience in the past 5 years? I have, twice. Neither were small companies. Both routes went electron because 95% of the native Mac developer pool works in Cupertino or China, and it’s a kiddy pool at that.

asoneth3• 5 years ago

They're a business so the question is not whether they technically have the cash available to do a thing, the question is whether doing that thing will yield the best return on investment compared to all the other things they could do.

Specifically, if Slack created new development teams to build native clients for Mac and Windows, would that effort eventually yield enough additional revenue to be worthwhile?

(Mind you, I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know Slack's financials, just pointing out that it's the real question governing whether they should use Electron.)

friedman235• 5 years ago

At the end of the day, so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers

Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period. Someone inevitably mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app. Electron is really the only cross platform option.

eitland3• 5 years ago

Someone inevitable mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app.

Let me start with Telegram. The ux is universally liked (yes, even by the Mac crowd!)

Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period.

If someone just wanted to create cross platform applications quickly and push them upon people who don't have a choice (i.e. in an enterprise) there always used to be Java Swing as well.

Far easier than Electron, even approaching VB6-simplicity in GUI design, but with a sane language behind.

So, GP was right: It makes it easier for frontend devs.

Edit: yes, a lot.

JCWasmx865• 5 years ago

Musescore? Wireshark? Transmission? TeXStudio?

dTal2• 5 years ago

Find me a single successful QT based app

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...

What a weird thing to say. Ableton, 3ds Max, Photoshop Elements, Google Earth, Mathematica... Qt probably has a longer list of success stories than any other cross platform UI toolkit.

pif• 5 years ago

the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused

Enabling more sht being shipped is not a badge of honor for a technology. Same goes for Visual Basic and Go, and for all those effort to dumb down software development when what the world needs is for quality* in software to be valued over quantity.

_zamorano_2• 5 years ago

Easier?

You can get a functional, graphical, Hello World! WinForms app running in like 10 seconds, ok, perhaps 20 seconds if your computer is slow

I can teach anybody with very basic programming skills to build something fancy in like 2 hours

No idea about Mac environment, but I guess it must be similar.

anonymouse008• 5 years ago

For some reason Windows apis are like hieroglyphs to me — coming from Mac Storyboard/ UIKit conventions…

Any advice?

jahewson• 5 years ago

I’m not trying to ship hello world, I’m trying to ship a 100k line frontend with 60fps animations, PDF export, video and audio recording, and 3rd party html rendering. Try doing that with WinForms - the batteries are very much not included. Windows APIs are just a mess.

And if I succeed then my prize is what? I get to do it again on two other platforms?

vb6sp6• 5 years ago

I only have so many gb of ram which means i am limited in the number of electron apps i can run on my system

criddell5• 5 years ago

The anti-Electron crowd understands the reasons Electron has taken off just as you understand that there are benefits to native apps. It's just a matter of different priorities.

I don't think anybody is on a particularly high horse.

mirashii• 5 years ago

I believe this community fully understands everything in your post, and believes Electron is a bad decision anyways. Why? Because when we're talking about these things, we're *users*. As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software. I care that it respects common UI conventions. I care that it's secure. I care that it doesn't use unnecessary resources. I care that it integrates well with the rest of my operating system. I care that it supports i18n and accessibility controls.

Electron is approachable because it eschews all of these things in favor of convenience to the developer, but these things are important to the user, and the user is who we should care about. We write software to serve users. We need to be asking ourselves if the benefit of the barrier to entry on producing applications be so low as to give up all the benefits of more traditional ways of application development (I'd argue no) and whether it's worth trying to bridge the approachability divide with easier APIs for developers and making the development experience as user friendly as possible (I'd argue yes).

friedman235• 5 years ago

As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software

Most users only care about features which is directly connected to speed of software development.

You are speaking for all users but I'm certain that things you are saying are not true for example, users don't care if an app uses "unnecessary resources" unless it's fast enough. Users definitely do not care about UI conventions, most probably don't even know there are conventions. As for security, if you are using anything written in C or C++ you already lost there.

asoneth3• 5 years ago

As a user, I don't care how easy it was for a developer to write the software.

Users care transitively since there is a correlation between the amount of effort it takes to write a piece of software and the price required to sustain the development of said software. In my experience, many users care more about price than consistency or speed.

In cases where users are willing to pay more (such as with some professional software) you'll often find a lot more native applications.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

I care that it doesn't use unnecessary resources.

I have never heard a non nerd say anything like that.

caconym_4• 5 years ago

As a user I care about having the features I want, working the way they're supposed to. And, as someone who uses all of Windows, macOS, and Linux in a typical day, I want these features to work consistently across platforms. There is really nothing worse than a "cross platform" application that fucks you when you try to move back and forth, and the Electron applications I've used consistently do better at this than anything else. If Electron itself is the reason these teams are able to focus on features and let compatibility "just work" for the most part, that is IMO a huge point in its favor.

More broadly, I think the popularity of Electron apps is evidence that users are actually very happy with them. There's an argument to be made that modern software is in general bad for users, but plenty of Electron applications (e.g. vscode, Obsidian) are IMO relatively unimpeachable in terms of offering real useful functionality with a minimum of dark patterns and/or other sketchy practices.

tomc1985• 5 years ago

As one of those haters, I would have so much less of a problem with it if it wasn't a sledgehammer of a platform, and a resource hog. IMO it's just plain disrespectful to users to inflict them with this crap

Also, I'm pretty sure it's easier to fire of Visual Studio and start clicking-and-dragging controls onto a form in C#, and you get a better programming language with it to boot. It's just too bad WinForms/WPF aren't cross-platform...

Why are so many people slobbering over web developers and front end people any way?

mikojan• 5 years ago

99.999% of what Electron does may be achieved bundling your content into a single HTML file on your desktop. For the remaining .001% you are paying a ridiculous prize in terms of performance and space utilization.

Electron does not solve a "massive problem". It solves a very minor problem. But web developers are precisely the people who rather than studying the target's platform or studying their own platform (you probably don't need Electron) would just do the most nonsensical thing that comes to mind.

zzyzxd• 5 years ago

so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers.

I don't know who failed to realize this. I rarely see comments refusing to admit that "building one electron app is easier than building 3 native apps for Windows/Mac/Linux". Most of people criticize the use of electron when megacorps undervalue user experience and make all sorts of excuses to use electron for the sake of cost saving in software development.

In many HN posts, as users who are technical enough to understand the impact of electron apps on their computers, I think the general idea is that native apps simply feel better and electron should not be encouraged.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

Many people fail to realize that the user just does not care. Does the app work? Non nerds do not care that it's not elegant under the hood or that it eats memory and storage.

Are there better ways to build native apps?

Depends. Is it a choice between using Electron or drowning in complexity and not shipping anything at all? An app is better than no app.

jmfldn3• 5 years ago

We get all that and we're saying that it comes with massive tradeoffs. The cost is massive resource footprints, inflexibility, sluggish performance, harder to reason about from a security or performance point of view because of the tower of software and abstraction you're building on top of. Many reasons.

I'm not saying it's not useful but I'm not falling over myself to argue we should all be using this stuff.

geodel• 5 years ago

True. I also get a chuckle, when people say housing, medicine, healthcare, daycare college is too expensive. Imagine if these good things simply did not exist. It would be much worse.

So whiner need to shut up already and buy a new computer annually where electron run normally.

pdimitar• 5 years ago

I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities

I, too, can tear down a straw man. But there are economical factors at play here and it's strange that you think that technical workers are oblivious to them.

Electron is compounding a problem that is not going away soon, or ever. People will not buy more expensive laptops to do their work (many simply can't). In the era of remote work the costs more laptops that can take the load that an Electron app introduces, is swallowed by employers -- and some don't want to do it.

This pressure is mounting, I assure you. Employers keep complaining there are no employees -- and what they actually mean is "we can't find people with laptops good enough for Slack and Discord and Excel and we don't want to buy them those". And I am not talking about programming jobs -- there it's usually very well understood that you have to buy the staff good machines (although I've been issued some pretty average machines but hey).

So employers keep screaming that they need more and better workers. The potential workers are like "eff this crap, I am not getting paid enough to buy a MacBook", plus many people have enough common sense not to reinvest their income in tech that company should have bought them in the first place.

How do you think this tug of war is going to end? By proclaiming "coding with Electron" (or PHP / WordPress since you mentioned them) is a basic human right? (lol) At one point something will give out and I can assure you it's not going to be society. It's going to be the tech companies who can't ever be bothered to invest a little bit in creating a cross-platform GUI toolkit.

So yeah, keep going on and on about how the technical people don't understand important things. From where I am standing it looks like that it's you who doesn't get it -- you are only bringing up ease of development, and there are much more factors in this situation.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

I always get a chuckle at all the hate Electron gets on HN, or in very technical communities.

Oh so true. It is such an indicator of lack of experience, too. Clearly they have never tried to support a cross-platform application, because Electron is utterly seamless from Win10 to Mac to Linux, even for USB and serial hardware. It has shaved literal man-years off development of our primary application at my company.

It's like haters are just admitting how junior they are.

rektide• 5 years ago

Great article. It starts by setting forth a good basis, that I think covers almost all of the primary Electron complaints. There's a very outraged comment decrying these plus also a difficult messy dev story[1], but generally I think the article starts by outlining the criticism fairly well.

After enumerating the problems with Electron, the article outlines a wide range of alternatives. This is such a great exploration! I love love love for example the idea of localhost http servers. The article discusses them! I feel differently than the author, but great & honest review:

I know this is highly subjective, but I really appreciate having a separate window for each application, along with good OS integrations such as native menu bars and dialogs.

Covering up & coming webview embedders like Tauri really won me over. The author showed a deep & expansive knowledge of up & coming alternatives, that still make use of the wonderful great web platform so many folks know & enjoy:

Many projects are trying to overcome Electron’s drawbacks using this approach, such as Electrino, webview, Tauri, and many more.

And it highlights that these alternatives still lack a lot of standard native integration, that it's not yet baked in anywhere near as well as Electron does:

You see, if you choose this approach, you will need to do a lot of “plumbing” yourself, as you don’t have access to any of the convenient APIs exposed by Electron. Do you want a menu bar? You have to write the low-level bindings yourself, often multiple times depending on the number of platforms you are looking to support.

I'm hoping some of these up & comers continue to advance, continue to make inroads. Electron has been 100% a magic bullet for countless great apps, big and small. Is it 100% painless? No. But it's pretty damned good, and it marries good UX development to the power & capabilities of server-side technology, in pretty excellently & unique cross-platform way, and that's a really great combination.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420450

verall• 5 years ago

There might be a chance to dynamically link the LGPL version and avoid paying for the complete license, but that’s not always possible.

This is such FUD. The normal way to use Qt is dynamically linked, it is not difficult to use the LGPL version, you most likely don't use the premium features, and the restrictions are about using Qt to create embedded devices.

There are good reasons not to use Qt, like that many teams don't have the discipline to maintain a large C++ gui application. There are plenty of crap broken Qt apps because it is easy to screw up. There are few responsive electron apps because it is difficult to make fast.

Easier to make a mediocre app in electron -> classic worse is better in action.

friedman235• 5 years ago

A lot of people hate electron but frankly, it's the future of desktop applications and probably the future of mobile applications. The browser is currently the best implementation of a true cross platform framework. People complain about nebulous concepts like "bloat" but I think fragmentation across platforms is just as if not more harmful and bad. For mobile for example, I exclusively build native iOS apps because the ecosystem is superior and I simply do not have the bandwidth as an individual to maintain software for 3 unique platforms (web, iOS, and Android) so I just don't build Android apps because the android market is just not valuable.

Also as a user of many electron based apps, I currently use apple silicon native electron apps on my m1 macbook air and they are extremely snappy with only 16gb of ram (go download the canary version of discord which is compiled to apple silicon if you want to see the difference). If there is one entity that I'm truly angry at it is intel for completely mishandling and holding back the desktop processor ecosystem for the past decade (or longer).

aaronbrethorst• 5 years ago

"Did you notice that most desktop apps that feel snappy don’t include any animation?"

well, this is patently false. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

JCWasmx865• 5 years ago

Code once, deploy on Windows, macOS, and Linux

This is a major pain point of electron. Sure you can save some costs, as you only have to write one GUI, but the result is always really bad.

The only electron application that is even remotely usable is VSCodium. MS Teams is a slow dumpsterfire and a mess of UI (Why do they even implement own "Close Window" buttons?)

Furthermore it is simply annoying if an application does not look like the rest of my desktop

jrm43• 5 years ago

As an amateur programmer, it really does feel like Electron would be one of those things that's absolutely garbage except for literally everything else which is even worse.

I am able to do and automate all sorts of very cool and amazing things that wow friends and family, mostly through bash as well as some Python.

And then there's GUIs. It makes no sense that they are this hard to program. If it's the tiniest bit more complex than something that can be done with Zenity, it's probably not going to happen. Nothing comes close to being as easy as some web-type GUI, which aren't themselves that easy.

criddell5• 5 years ago

Furniture made by a very skilled craftsperson is often beautifully finished even on the surfaces you don't normally see. Quick and easy may often be the best way to do something, but sometimes you end up doing things the hard way because you care about making the best thing you can.

asoneth3• 5 years ago

This is a great point. I have a few pieces of furniture hand-made by skilled craftspeople and they're lovely.

But most of my furniture still comes from Ikea and the like because it costs at least an order of magnitude less to build and ship.

Electron will continue to grow in popularity for similar reasons.

jrm43• 5 years ago

I don't buy this argument for software in the least; it presumes this zero-sum tradeoff between "effort to build" and "quality of outcome" that I just don't believe actually necessarily exists in a medium of infinite reproduceability like software.

In my experience what's really happening here is the "hypercard" problem. Namely, there is a tendency, perhaps subconscious, for programmers (or perhaps meta-programmers) to NOT make "tools for building" too easy because they're scared of writing themselves out of a job or a market -- or they're trying to create or retain some exclusivity. I'm not necessarily saying this is always evil, but it's always a thing to consider and is likely happening all the time.

pixelgeek3• 5 years ago

I wish writers would stop using overdone intros like this

"Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 5 years..."

I see this sort of thing and I just want to stop reading. Only worse is

"This isn't your father's..."

markus_zhang• 5 years ago

I think the hidden reason many hate Electron is because they are forced to use software written in Electron by the choice of their companies. For example I'm forced to use Teams at work but I don't even have Teams on my personal laptop.

JCWasmx865• 5 years ago

I would give soo much for a native GTK MS Teams client

rado• 5 years ago

Most software today is bad, Electron is worse. Tolerating such concepts leads to mainstream software abominations like the Epic Games Launcher. In a world ever so dependent on technology.

akacia• 5 years ago

This. Good software can be made even when using Electron - just take a look at Visual Studio Code. It pains me during my work as a software developer how many times we have to cut edges, because companies want to minimize their expenses (and developers get in a habit of doing so even when they don’t have to).

dTal2• 5 years ago

The problem with Electron is that it shouldn't be necessary. We all already have web browsers installed. Why does each application need to bundle its own? Because browser vendors refuse to provide useful APIs?

Decabytes• 5 years ago

Electron exists because cross platform native desktop development is a terrible experience, and many developers (some who even frequent HN!) prefer going with the easy and fast route (due to a variety of pressures) over the native route.

It’s the same reason why people gravitate towards MIT and Apache licenses over things like lGPL. It doesn’t require a developer to think as hard if they are in violation of the license with their project. Though plenty of developers still screw this up even with those licenses (see the devs of sonic colors ultimate and the violation of the Godot Engine’s MIT license)

pixelgeek3• 5 years ago

I get the feeling that we could all just copy and paste our comments from the last Electron post.

I doubt anyone is going to chance their mind about it. It is the jQuery of cross-platform development.

c-smile• 5 years ago

As of sizes ...

For Sciter Quark ( https://quark.sciter.com ) I've measured size of minimal "Hello World".

- Electron: 50 MB on disk, 200 MB of RAM and at least 2 processes running.

- QT: 5 MB (and 30 MB if + QtWebKit) and ~70 MB (200 MB if QtWebKit) of RAM.

- Sciter Quark (standalone Sciter executable): 5 MB on disk, 32 MB in RAM. That includes HTML/CSS UI, JS engine, NodeJS alike runtime.

Out of the box Sciter works on same platforms as Electron.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

I worked on a cross-platform C# application that ran on both Mac and Windows. I really liked the language and most of the experience. The biggest problem was that the C# toolchain was very glitchy on Mac. (I did have to write shims in C so that Objective C could call into C#.)

In our case, C# was the right choice because of what the application did. (There was no way we could be web based.) For many applications, Electron (or similar) is the right choice.

We did have two native UIs: WPF and Cocoa. The Mac developers eventually figured out how to use C# models and controllers from Objective C.

Again, I would only recommend such an approach if you need close integration with the UI. We had tray/taskbar icons, filesystem watchers, drivers... Things that really don't make sense to do in something like Electron.

I'd also like to point out one advantage of Electron, if you can do it: Garbage collection. I personally find memory management in C/C++/Rust a chore, so if Electron is "good enough," you get all the advantages of V8's garbage collector.

dangoor• 5 years ago

Hopefully, we'll start more commonly getting the benefits of Electron in a leaner package as with Tauri[1] or Wails[2]

[1] https://tauri.studio/en/ [2] https://wails.io

_some_r222• 5 years ago

Some sample experiences:

At my workplace I'm using Electron to build a data heavy application (bill of material, 3D visualization). Performance is spectacular, especially 3D visualization of very large models (threejs). I'm using agGrid for the tables. Also extremly fast and powerful.

The users don't care at all that the app is 93 MB and takes 3-5 seconds to start. They love the app for the performance, features and ease of use. I consider Electron as a great success in this case.

I'm using VS Code, Obsidian and Todoist daily. I love them and don't care that they're Electron apps.

mid-kid• 5 years ago

I love how he takes a huge, highly custom (custom widgets and things everywhere) and unoptimized Qt application (Telegram Desktop), that as of late has started shipping with a version of WebKit for some functionality related to payments, without mentioning it's unreasonably huge for a Qt application. Apps like qbittorrent are a third of its size, and this is not mentioning that platforms like linux have Qt installed as a system-wide library, making the whole size comparison moot. (you cannot install and use a system-wide version of electron for most electron apps).

He also fails to consider that there's bindings for all native platform UIs for a ton of languages. You could write gtk code in javascript or C# if you wanted, and this is especially relevant when mentioning WxWidgets. You don't have to write your business logic in C++ these days.

greenhatman• 5 years ago

Simply, a lot of software that makes people's lives easier wouldn't exist without Electron. So yes, Electron is good.

The same amount of effort spent in Electron wouldn't get you a better native app. It would more likely get you no app.

Why Electron Is a Necessary Evil

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