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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

O tempora o mores. Even calendar app requires Electron. Somebody please show them Qt.

For years, people complained that Linux was left out of the equation when apps were released. Then electron came along that made it super easy to be cross-platform with a performance loss. Now people complain that it's not written natively which seems silly for a calendar app. It's not like performance or look-and-feel is a huge issue. If they made it natively, people would complain it doesn't have a command-line API.

When people asked for Linux support, I don't think they meant make poor performing apps for everyone in exchange.

There are quite a number of cross-platform GUI libraries out there, and they've been options for decades, without performance loss.

AFAIK, the only thing that Elecron brings to the equation is the ability to use web languages that more people are familiar with to work in it, instead of yet another language. This trade-off came with a pretty huge downside in the form of a bloated parser though.

To be fair...a command line API is arguably one of the easier features to add to an existing GUI program. Certainly easier than achieving cross platform compatibility.

People have suggestions to add to everything. That doesn't mean that it's bad, just that it could be better. In software, "Best" will forever be a temporary title.

> It's not like performance or look-and-feel is a huge issue.

Well, the calendar is unusable on my macbook, while iCal bundled with macOS has no issues. So guess which one I'm going to use?

Can someone help me understand why is HN so "anti"-Electron. I had installed it couple of years ago and it had sucked up my system's memory, is that still the case?

Because apparently, for a bunch of people here, their most precious resource day to day is free RAM.

Well, I don't think that's an unreasonable request. From a developer perspective there are always a couple of apps that are always running like Terminal, Browser, Email Client and if a calendar application starts taking a huge chunk of the RAM then maybe its not worth it rather one might just use calendar.google.com as a tab in the browser.

I still think the attitude is unreasonablein a wider spectrum. I can back the criticism that you shouldn't write apps targeted at developers on resource intensive frameworks, but I also am very happy that we're in a position where fairly complex app development can be in the hands of people that would otherwise see thr barrier to entry as being too high. The potential that has to bring fresh ideas and approaches into the space in almost every area is outweighed by the limitations.

I would say that I'm less generous when companies reach global scale and still use it as a crutch to lower dev overheads though.

So you don't use any Electron-based apps right now. Why not? You will then answer your own question.

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