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0 pointsvdnkh3y ago0 comments

> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w

And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.

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toyg3y ago

It wasn't FOSS that settled on Electron - it was businesses and corporations.

Decisions were taken with an eye to balance sheets and P&L reports; Electron remains the cheapest option of them all, because the supply of moderately-skilled HTML/JS labor is naturally larger than for any other language - all thanks to choices the Netscape Corporation made in 1995, when they needed interactivity in their product and they needed it quick.

Drew_3y ago

Businesses and corporations are part of FOSS. The majority of FOSS doesn't exist without them.

skohan3y ago

Yeah but that's not the whole picture - it's not just FOSS choosing Electron so much as platform holders being hostile to cross-platform development.

For instance, if Apple had actually kept pace with OpenGL standards, and had embraced Vulkan, it would have been fairly straightforward to to build a native GUI framework which works across platforms.

Electron won because all the platform owners basically had to embrace the implementation of web standards on their platforms. So they couldn't prevent those tools from being used to deploy local software as well.

matthewmacleod3y ago

The absence of Vulkan on Apple platforms—something that it’s worth noting was developed after Apple’s Metal equivalent—is in absolutely no way even approaching a barrier to building a “native GUI framework”.

There literally are cross-platform native GUI frameworks. Even Electron itself is a third-party implementation of a GUI framework - it doesn’t use the platform’s web tech implementation and bundles its own.

skohan3y ago

It's just one example of an impediment. If all the major platforms used a consistent standards-based graphics API, you could have one implementation of the drawing layer shared between all platforms.

All these little wedges add up.

pessimizer3y ago

Electron piggybacked on the established (and enforced) open standards of the web to make up for a fragmented proprietary mess of software standards.

redavni3y ago

Indeed.

Imagine a world where everything had to be deployed to the JVM and all progress depended on Sun/Oracle. Or god help us, IE/VBScript.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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toyg3y ago

It wasn't FOSS that settled on Electron - it was businesses and corporations.

Drew_3y ago

Businesses and corporations are part of FOSS. The majority of FOSS doesn't exist without them.

skohan3y ago

Yeah but that's not the whole picture - it's not just FOSS choosing Electron so much as platform holders being hostile to cross-platform development.

matthewmacleod3y ago

skohan3y ago

It's just one example of an impediment. If all the major platforms used a consistent standards-based graphics API, you could have one implementation of the drawing layer shared between all platforms.

All these little wedges add up.

pessimizer3y ago

Electron piggybacked on the established (and enforced) open standards of the web to make up for a fragmented proprietary mess of software standards.

redavni3y ago

Indeed.

Imagine a world where everything had to be deployed to the JVM and all progress depended on Sun/Oracle. Or god help us, IE/VBScript.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse