the blind hate for electron apps in this thread is my pet peeve. Hating on electron because it's "bloated" and "uses a lot of memory" is an opinion only profoundly junior engineers who have never shipped anything can have. It is the kind thinking that only the "um ackshually" fresh newgrads can have because they chase extremely insignificant performance gains and try to hyperoptimize everything. They do not realize that engineering is a field of TRADEOFFS and PRAGMATISM and you actually have to cobble stuff together with a limited timeline. You can't just sit around and circlejerk about how you need sub-10mb binaries and all the code has to run in O(n) time, you NEED TO SHIP TO MAKE MONEY.
Let me clarify my position on electron/JS/webdev as a whole:
I think web applications are
by far the best cross-platform UI system ever designed and the ability to create consistent and reactive UIs across ***every*** single platform is an advantage that far outweighs their performance.My proof of this is that fact that engineering teams across the world have settled on it as the de facto standard for cross-platform development, entire industries have spawned overnight because of SPAs, and there has never been an era where more apps work on every platform.
The electron team and people who develop web browsers/engines (chrome, firefox, etc.) have made enormous strides in the safety, performance, and reliability of these platforms in the recent years. Javascript development is no longer a painful relic of multiple competing standards. HTML & CSS are the best they have ever been, it's literally only up from here and people who repeat the same tired old talking points that web dev sucks only do so because it's cool to do so.
To the people who still think web dev sucks as a UI creator: have you ever tried to create a UI using Qt? how about Swing? what about WPF or even the UI libraries in game engines such as Unity?
The fact of the matter is: all of those libraries suck, there has
never been a consistently good UI platform for apps that need to run on
ALL platforms. The only thing that ever came close was the web, and it's here to stay and just gets better and better.
I predict the future will have OSs implementing some kind of electron-like environment inside the OS so that all of these apps won't have to ship with a chrome binary, but we are already at the point where HTML & CSS is
the UI platform and most complaints have been addressed or are in the pipeline of being addressed.
when programmers take the speed/capacity of modern hardware for granted. why is there like 5 seconds of latency half the time when I'm menuing around my TV. Why does your stuffty little mod manager have Chromium embedded into it.
the only exception to my point is TVs, why the forget do all of them have such stuffty god damn processors. I have never bought a ""smart"" TV that functions without significant input lag or crashing. In this case, I think running an entire OS on the thing is overengineering and it should only display what the inputs are giving it. I want my TVs dumb as a brick
