Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Going to be starting a new electron app very soon (please, no comments about whether it's the correct choice and we should be using ${favoriteLibrary}. We discussed the pros and cons extensively, and we believe it is the best choice for us and our domain).

Are the breaking changes here significant enough as to render existing tutorials and such obsolete/inaccurate? If so, are there newer tutorials that would be better?

View on HN

They should be pretty minor. I've found that it's rare you need to rely on any of the Electron APIs. For the most part, Electron just provides a shell to load HTML/JS/CSS and that's where the overwhelming majority of the code lives.

The only time you need to access Electron APIs is to create and manage windows, system menus, etc.

For all the hate against it, we've been very happy with Electron. There's no way we'd have been able to afford to offer Windows and OS X given our limited budget without it.

Even with large budget it's pain to keep two codebase with different issue trackers etc..

To add to the other answers here, Electron recently switched to an approach to semver where major dependencies (in this both Node and Chromium) are always considered themselves a semver major/breaking change. This aligns with Node's similar, less recent switch to semver major for all V8 upgrades.

The biggest breaking changes here are very much that Chromium and Node were both upgraded. These are particularly breaking changes if you are using and/or building native Node libraries.

Skimming through the rest I didn't see anything that directly impacted any of the apps that I've worked on or any of the tutorials I've seen.

> Are the breaking changes here significant enough as to render existing tutorials and such obsolete/inaccurate?

That's not likely, the breaking changes are in the details of API. The fundamentals are the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com