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0 pointsKlonoar7y ago0 comments

I'm actually wading back into the comments here for this specific comment, because it's ridiculous.

It's not developer laziness. This is 100% a business decision, and if you've been doing this since the 80s, I'd expect you to know this by now.

Do you really think Slack & co chose Electron because it's making developers lives easier? Companies and people choose it because it. just. works. across platforms. This has a direct translation to money, no matter how much you stick your head in the sand about it. Less resources, less platform-specific wizardry, more focus on core features with faster turnaround time. _That_ is all that matters here at the end of the day, because programming is not - nor has been, for the majority of roles, for some time - been about coding and tinkering with bits. It's about increasing revenue for the company/product/whatever.

When you (the general you, not you specifically) rant about reimplementing everything Electron gives you on three platforms, you gloss over the wealth of shit a web browser provides for free. I have actually implemented some of this stuff outside of a browser, and I wouldn't do it again if you were paying me.

_Furthermore_, very rarely does anyone compare implementing something via Electron to native... but native is a landmine-filled problem area of it's own. macOS alone is horrendously undocumented these days for a good portion of stuff, and you'll end up with a litany of platform specific hacks for the most basic things.

Hell, the easiest response to this comment is this: neither of our opinions needs to be valid, because the market's opinion is that Electron is the better choice.

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laumars7y ago

I do get that point of view but there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples.

Take mobile app development: half the products that run on Electron on the desktop will still have native apps on mobiles. And even those that don’t would still have to use the native renderer on iOS and Windows Phone thus you’d be testing your common code base across multiple rendering engines anyway (which was the argument against the tool in this discussion).... and I’ve not even meantioned the slew of cross-platform applications that exist which have successfully avoided using Electron.

There are quite a few cross platform frameworks out there these days and different languages that can leverage them, however the next point I think is the real crux of the problem:

I will grant you that Electron does lower the barrier for entry (which is ironic because I personally find the web stack more awkward to develop in than native widgets - but each to their own). And maybe that’s where the biggest cost saving comes for the business; you can hire cheaper engineers to build and support your desktop software?

In any case, I’m not blind to the appeal of Electron; I just don’t agree with how important it is in the same way as the GP does.

KlonoarOP7y ago

Eh, no - nowadays most Electron-based apps would opt for a React Native app on iOS, so they can reuse most of the JS logic from their web counterparts. The big players (Slack, Spotify, etc) will introduce native things because it makes sense to, but there's no reason the small players will do this.

Multiple rendering engines in this case also makes sense because the form factor you're designing for is inherently different. As a result, the usability factor comes into play... you're never writing one UI at that point anyway. The point of Electron is that you turn building and testing 3 rendering engines into testing 1.

saagarjha7y ago

> Less resources, less platform-specific wizardry, more focus on core features with faster turnaround time.

Where can I request the "core features" of performance and usability?

KlonoarOP7y ago

You and I have done this specific dance many times, in case you haven't realized. You've failed to convince me that native wins on this for most devs... we've gone pretty in-depth on this before re: macOS, too. ;P

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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laumars7y ago

I do get that point of view but there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples.

There are quite a few cross platform frameworks out there these days and different languages that can leverage them, however the next point I think is the real crux of the problem:

In any case, I’m not blind to the appeal of Electron; I just don’t agree with how important it is in the same way as the GP does.

KlonoarOP7y ago

saagarjha7y ago

> Less resources, less platform-specific wizardry, more focus on core features with faster turnaround time.

Where can I request the "core features" of performance and usability?

KlonoarOP7y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse