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In Defense of the Popular Framework Electron (dev.to)
Electron, a popular framework that allows developers to write code once and seamlessly deploy it across multiple platforms, has been a topic of conversation lately among developers and users alike. Many have criticised Electron-powered apps to be "too memory intensive." A developer, who admittedly uses a high-end computer, shares his perspective: I can speak for myself when I say Electron runs like a dream. On a typical day, I'll have about three Atom windows open, a multi-team Slack up and running, as well as actively using and debugging my own Electron-based app Standard Notes. [...] So, how does it feel to run this bloat train of death every day? Well, it feels like nothing. I don't notice it. My laptop doesn't get hot. I don't hear the fan. I experience no lags in any application. [...] But aside from how it makes end-users feel, there is an arguably more important perspective to be had: how it makes software companies feel. For context, the project I work in is an open-source cross-platform notes app that's available on most platforms, including web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. All the desktop applications are based off the main web codebase, and are bundled using Electron, while the iOS and Android app use their own native codebases respectively, one in Swift and the other in Kotlin. And as a new company without a lot of resources, this setup has just barely allowed us to enter the marketplace. Three codebases is two too many codebases to maintain. Every time we make a change, we have to make it in three different places, violating the most sacred tenet of computer science of keeping it DRY. As a one-person team deploying on all these platforms, even the most minor change will take at minimum three development days, one for each codebase. This includes debugging, fixing, testing, bundling, deploying, and distributing every single codebase. This is by no means an easy task.
Atom is vaguely OK, but I wouldn't care to try to maintain js, but Slack is like being trapped in a large echoing room filled with people madly shouting "ooh, shiney!"
It also dragged my 32 GB dev server into the weeds, so I probbaly agree with the criticisms of Electron proper.
davecb@spamcop.net
It pretty much just boils down to ignorance. There are a lot of "programmers" (I use that term very reluctantly) who only know JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Only a fraction of them know PHP or Ruby on Rails. That's as deep and as wide as their knowledge and experience goes.
They don't know C. They don't know C++. They don't know Java. They don't know C#. They don't know anything other than web development.
Being so ignorant, they don't realize just how awful their preferred technologies really are. They also don't realize how much better the alternatives can be.
So what do they do? They write absolutely everything in the only language they know: JavaScript. They build their applications (or their half-arsed attempts at applications) using the closest thing to a UI framework that they know: HTML and CSS. And the results are disastrous.
We see the same thing happen with databases. People who know nothing about SQL or relational theory find that they need to store data, and instead of using a real database, they choose some shitty NoSQL database instead.
The worst part of all of this is that these people refuse to learn how to use real technologies. They're so ignorant that they're unwilling to look beyond what they know. So this problem just gets worse and worse. They try to write more and more software using JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and the end result is that we see more and more extraordinarily bloated and slow applications.