Show HN: Sciter and Node.js versus Electron | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sciter and Node.js versus Electron

terrainformatica.com

22 pointsc-smile13 comments

Sciter's author here...

I am thinking of making Sciter as UI module for NodeJs.

1. Strip down version of Sciter - only HTML/CSS/Graphics modules. It will use JavaScript of NodeJs (either V8 or Chackra).

2. That version will be Open Source in the same way as NodeJs itself.

The goals are:

1. To provide more optimal alternative to Electron - faster and far less resource consuming.

2. Modular and reusable implementation. Example: Sciter contains my own Graphics C++ library that wraps various backends: Direct2D/Write, CoreGraphics, Skia, Cairo, GDI+. Such Graphics module library alone can be useful in other projects. Same is for HTML/CSS modules.

Not sure if all that is interesting for someone. If it is - please let me know.

It definitely is interesting. There is a huge pent up demand for a cross platform easy to use GUI lib which is manifesting in the form of people using electron despite I'd bring resource intensive.

I will say open source or not is not an issue for most. Few look at source and rare modify it. I just want an easy API.

Sciter's API is already simple enough. It is about 10..20 pure C functions that you will use for creating window, loading UI resources and receiving callbacks from the UI.

Check minimal integration sample: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/master/demos/mini...

I'd be very interested in this. There's a lot of decentralized tech that uses nodejs modules which are hard to wrap up in a GUI without Electron. I greatly dislike the resource waste of Electron and have been actively looking for alternatives.

I need to run a vue app that can load an external file into its own frame and print that to PDF. Can sciter do that? Right now I'm using a webview in electron which lets me print just that webview to PDF.

Sciter supports print and print preview out of the box: https://terrainformatica.com/2015/05/25/sciter3-print-previe...

As of PDF generation: Skia backend is capable of PDF generation but that functionality is not exposed to script yet.

Another option: Windows supports PDF print drivers so you can just print on it to get PDF.

Comparing the entire Visual Studio Code with a little sample IDE application is kind of barely a test at all?

That's true. Better is to compare https://html-notepad.com application. It's size is even smaller as it does not include V8.

I mean that Visual Code has way more scripts to support different languages but these are text, highly compressible, files. In any case they are not loaded all at once but RAM consumption is still 6 times more than it could be for that type of application.

VSCode has a richer UI, more functionality and of course supports extensions, source control etc by default. It just does a whole lot more. I think you’d be better off comparing with an actual port of the example compiled for each engine.

Check Typora Markdown editor: https://typora.io/ - it is a markdown editor made with Electron.

It has as sort of WYSIWYG editor as markdown source editing so it is conceptually close to html-notepad.

All basic ratios are the same - it consumes RAM 4-5 times more than it should. Same with distribution size and size on disk.

Yet I think that it will be fair to compare Sublime Text and Visual Code as they have close functionality. Sublime (has its own DOM and uses script for plugins) consumes 10 times less RAM than Visual Code.

Each Electron application is a full scale browser with its own JS VM instance and Node.js that is full scale web server with another instance of JS VM. It is just that for communication they use IPC rather than HTTP.

As many E applications you are running as many browsers and servers you have in memory. That is by Electron's design - nothing new here.

@c-smile - Looks interesting, does sciter offer a systray/menubar api too? Cause thats one thing I would really want in a desktop app SDK.

Check this sample : https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/id... in SDKs sciter.exe. That is tray notification.

As of menu: sdk/samples/menu

Just what I have been looking for. +1. Can’t wait to take it for a test drive.

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