Looking at you Ionic, Tauri, ... : programmerhumor

[-] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 158 points 1 year ago

I fucking hate Electron

[-] joyjoy@lemm.ee 97 points 1 year ago

If given a choice between an electron app and nothing, I choose the electron app.

[-] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 58 points 1 year ago

same. still dont like them tho

[-] dabu@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

I choose nothing.

Or a website

[-] TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I'll talk nothing over a terribly implemented Electron app that devours system resources and brings every other Electron app down when it inevitably OOMs.

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 51 points 1 year ago

You hate electron or you hate developers who make inefficient electron apps? Some examples? (Serious question, because I make electron apps)

[-] I_like_cats@lemmy.one 108 points 1 year ago

There's no such thing as a efficient electron app. First electron apps have 80MB of overhead since electron needs to bundle a whole ass browser. Also in runtime this requires 120MB of ram.

If you really want to use webviews to make an app use Tauri.

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 29 points 1 year ago

The literal most popular IDE amongst software developers is VS Code that's built on Electron.

[-] I_like_cats@lemmy.one 50 points 1 year ago

I know. I also use VSCode. However I just hate how much ram it uses. I had a Laptop with 4Gb of ram and I could not open VsCode on that thing when I had literally anything else open because the system would freeze.

Just because VsCode uses Electron doesn't mean that Electron is not bad

[-] naught@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago

Tbf, it's typically language servers and extensions causing cpu and memory footprints. If you were to open a dumb txt file, I doubt you'd encounter issues. The app itself is pretty light. I say this as a neovim user who has managed to make its memory footprint balloon ^_^

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[-] ExLisper@linux.community 14 points 1 year ago

I think parsing code and all the dependencies will require way more than 120MB of RAM so for VS Code the overhead doesn't matter that much. For smaller apps 120MB of ram is insane.

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[-] griefreeze@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

This comment feels like it just stepped out of a time machine. I can't remember the last time I fretted over 200MB of overhead/memory usage.

I'm in no way judging you, merely commenting on how different our use cases and expectations are.

[-] I_like_cats@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago

This is a problem. Computers got faster over time and one would assume apps would also open faster. But no, developers that don't care about their application's performance (or companies, most of the time it's not the developer's fault) cause us to wait longer. Microsoft recently tweeted that they managed to get Microsoft Teams startup time down to 9 seconds from 18. I mean what the fuck.

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[-] 30p87@feddit.de 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mainly electron itself. For example the discord app (which uses electron) is less memory efficient (and much more restrictive etc.) than just a separate Firefox instance. It also had many problems with being up to date, but that's due to the discord devs deciding they want an own, custom electron, based on an outdated version. The main problem with electron for me stems from the chromium base, as basically any large app based on chromium (discord, spotify and steam) has massive flickering and performance problems on Wayland+Nvidia. A special combination, but still a factor for a 'cross platform' framework.

On the other hand, stuff like Signal never had any problems on my machine.

So, just use the stock electron, optimally the system one [electron binary], and see if you can enable wayland compatibility natively (otherwise we need to use environment variables etc., which works moderately at best).

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[-] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 8 points 1 year ago

Developers who make inefficient apps. Most apps are sadly utter garbage

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[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 134 points 1 year ago

A pile of HTML + JS is the only cross platform GUI toolkit that's practical to deploy.

I'm not really happy about it myself, but realistically there's not any other option than just bundling a website into a wrapper.

And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.

[-] hansl@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

Java, of course. /s

[-] Molten_Moron@lemmings.world 41 points 1 year ago

3 billion devices can't be wrong!

[-] hansl@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

Real talk; if Java didn’t have their head up their own arses, it would have been the real solution. But Oracle does what Oracle does.

Do not anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.

If you are a website, that's easy, you are actually making the correct choice with Electron insofar that you want a browser.

If you're doing an application not a webpage, then we're walking W+L+Mac+Phones, that's more tricky. I'm assuming for a second you want a usable UI (otherwise we'd be using Electron again :P ) so we're talking two applications at least, one for mobile, one for desktop + maybe iPads.

And then it's usually already too pricey to bother:

Web frontend devs are far cheaper than application developers.
Might as well just do a website, runs in everything. Only need to develop once.
Updating is immediate with a website, don't have to do any deployment/upgrade/downgrade plans.

[-] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think Flutter and Avalonia both tick all those boxes.

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[-] greenskye@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Why is Firefox a 'platform'? I'm assuming chromium is for chromeOS devices, but I don't know of any device that just runs Firefox.

[-] Commiunism@lemmy.wtf 19 points 1 year ago

they probably meant web versions of the app that run both on chromium and gecko (firefox) browser engines

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[-] backhdlp 8 points 1 year ago

If you count browser engines, don't forget Webkit.

[-] jw13@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Chromium and Firefox are web browsers, of course they only support HTML+JS. That’s what they were designed for.

[-] dan@upvote.au 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

of course they only support HTML+JS.

WebAssembly is becoming more popular, which lets you run code written in languages other than JavaScript in a browser. It's not possible to do everything yet, so you still need some JS code and a bridge between the WASM and JS, but it's getting there. Emulators that run in the browser often use it.

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[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 97 points 1 year ago

"Here's a website that you needed to install on your phone to see!"

[-] meliaesc@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago

They want you to install the app so they cand send you notifications/ads.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 year ago

Yup. That plus steal all your contacts and anything else they can get direct or indirect permissions for.

[-] ExLisper@linux.community 76 points 1 year ago

I though the same but I tried Tauri and it makes sense. Unlike electron you're not shipping the entire browser with your app and the the low level stuff is just rust so the integration is nice and easy. And using webview for UI? Why not? The reactive libraries are actually nice to work with, it's easy to customize, you have all the tools to inspect/debug your code. It's definitely better then trying to fit GTK into rust.

[-] lobut@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

I'm using Tauri to play around with Rust. I like it so far.

I always thought it uses far fewer resources than electron.

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[+] Presi300@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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[-] xantoxis@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

lol they did, that's what webapps RUN ON. TBH I don't get the original complaint. Lots of people have bad webapps; back when native apps were the norm, lots of people had bad native apps. It's not really a problem with the runtime framework.

[-] Schmeckinger@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They run on them, but its not that easy compared to a web app. Why isn't everyone programming in machine code? Every other language literally runs on it. There is a reason we use abscractions.

[+] Dmian@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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[-] marcos@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

He was late to the party. Everyone by that time was trying to make applications and web development converge. Mozilla had an entire framework derived from the web.

[-] CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

You mean, it's all Electron? 🌍👨‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

[-] toastal@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At least webviews don’t (yet, Google be trying) have the ability to request attestation & ban me for not using the stock, bloatware OS every device comes with. Bonus that I get to keep my data inside the browser’s sandbox; it’s the easiest way to be safe with proprietary software.

If only my bank could get the memo & make their website not suck (it legit checks for Netscape Navigator 4 in the source) so I can be at peace with microG+LineageOS in the phone space (all the banks here do it & I already switched once until my bank, slowly but inevitably ‘modernized’ their app).

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[-] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

We switched to Flutter, works great for IOS and Android, but the website is trash.

[-] ExLisper@linux.community 7 points 1 year ago

I tried Flutter and hated it. It was buggy (there's thousands of post on the internet saying that you have to do 'rm ios/Podfile && flutter build ios' and similar. the build breaks often and standard solution is 'turn it off and on again'), the components library is too verbose and not nice to work with, the support was bad (as in open a bug report with example repo and they would react after 6 months) and everything that's not 'hello world' was complicated or impossible (like writing tests). I'm definitely not using it again.

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[+] EasternLettuce@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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[-] rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Cross-platform apps - The Linux experience:

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[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Though calling them "cross platform" when all you're doing is opening a website in a browser is IMO a bit rich. Is lemmy cross-platform, too?

If at least they had native UI elements on each platform, we'd be getting somewhere. Fitting design and all.

[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not just "opening a website in a browser". The UI itself is displayed in a WebView, but Electron (and Tauri etc.) also have code running outside the WebView which interfaces with native APIs etc. Just for a simple example - a normal browser application couldn't open a file on your drive before without showing a dialog (and it still can't without getting permission first), which Electron etc. can.

And this code is absolutely cross-platform. So how is it rich to call an application with a cross-platform UI and cross-platform functionality "cross-platform"?

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