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Comment by coffeedoughnuts | Hacker News Reader

People are bemoaning the use of Electron on this thread quite a lot, for a lot of different reasons. Rather than just complaining that "Electron == Bad" does anyone have any thoughts on why Electron is so popular, and how to use that information to come to a compromise that keeps those benefits without the inherent negatives of memory usage & speeds issue?

My two pence; A consolidated push of a React Native for Desktop seems like it could really help here. You get a lot of the benefits of working in a web-like environment (the developer experience, the development speed, the ability to share code across runtimes) but you end up with Native Code (Swift, C#, Cpp, etc.) for each supported OS. RN for Mobile OSs has done wonders in my opinion. I think a real push for RN in the Desktop could be the next big thing for desktop apps.

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Perhaps if Javascript were used more like a traditional programming language? I.e. to build a terminal emulator, you find the JS library that binds to OpenGL or SDL or X or Cocoa or whatever, and you write JS code against that library, then compile it into a bytecode/binary.

> and how to use that information to come to a compromise

Electron is popular because it uses regular web tech to build apps. Electron is slow because it uses regular web tech to build apps.

Where is the compromise?

Another question is "popular with who"..

> the developer experience, the development speed, the ability to share code across runtimes

I don't know what you mean by "the developer experience", but surely any high-level language gets you speedy development, and architectural agnosticism?

A compromise would be to use Electron/Chromium as shared libraries so the bulk of those apps would be using the same 500 MB - nearly free lunch for users who would have Chromium running all day either way.

That basically already exists.[0] The only major issue is that they're limited to the permissions of normal webpages in the browser.

[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps

Chrome apps are being discontinued on most OSes, so they recommend migrating to Electron or NW.js if a normal web app or extension won't work. https://blog.chromium.org/2016/08/from-chrome-apps-to-web.ht...

Yes! Microsoft supports RN for Windows and Ubuntu made a Lib too. Apple hasn't spoken up but some fans are working on one...

RN for windows is for UWP / store apps only. If you don't want to use the store, or want RN on windows 7 you're out of luck. I think even windows 8 might be off the table

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