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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

I'd say Electron is "good enough" for many purposes, meaning its advantages overweigh the disadvantages. Lower barrier to entry compared to native solutions, developer productivity, cross-platform sharing of code.. Plenty of large companies use it to build (even flagship) products.

The disadvantage that is most talked about is its final bundle size, and I'm not aware of any developments that are trying to solve it. I'm in a project with a number of Electron apps built and in the pipeline, and we're searching for a potential in-house solution, of a central app that hosts/downloads/embeds "mini-apps" that run on the same foundation, to share the same Chromium run-time. Really hoping for a community solution to this though.

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There is an issue on Github with the idea of creating a runtime for Electron: you would only need to package your apps and a shared Electron runtime would execute the different app you have installed on your OS, a la Adobe Air.

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

They would need to introduce some kind of stable release for this to be effective, at the moment they seem to be releasing every couple of weeks: https://github.com/electron/electron/releases

After seeing what disasters Adobe Air, desktop Java, and Flash have been, why do people think that they suddenly can do better?

Because progress comes after many dead ends.

Thank you for the link, the whole thread was very informative, for the various ideas being weighed and some kind of consensus forming as to the proposed solution.

It got a bit daunting to see in more detail the potential complexity of the problem. Someone noted in the comments here, that there have been countless attempts at solving this "shared runtime for cross-platform apps" idea, apparently with a still unsatisfactory history.

Reading through the thread does give me hope, since the discussion is on-going after 2+ years, which means people are interested in an efficient solution. Seeing the HN crowd go at this Electron topic again and again, always with a kind of emotional "turbulence", implies that this is a worthy problem to solve.

I like that one of the recent suggestions is to "split the Electron", to accommodate bindings with theoretically any language.

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