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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Hey, another electron thread. Wait a second, did someone already mention how horrible Javascript is? The memory consumption? The minimal integration into the OS/desktop (think accessibility)? Hmm ok, I need something new...

Here it comes: chrome is inherently instable. The Google developers give a shit about their dependency management and have trillions of open source projects just literally copied into their trunk. They also don't provide any API to speak of, chromium as a library does not exist, and don't get me started about the arcane build process of chrome.

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Disclaimer: Electron dev

So few quick things, the projects that are copied are done so to guarantee deterministic builds in an isolated build environment (no dependencies on third party systems).

The API you say they don't provide is literally the API that Electron uses. --> https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/conten...

And as for the build process, eh, it's kinda slow but it's hardly arcane. On linux you can run like 4 commands and it'll build Chromeium.

Yeah. Four commands. The first one downloads binaries from the internet. If I was inclined to do so, I would not need to build in the first place ;).

Give it a try with the current HEAD of their home-grown and undocumented build tool and see how far you get.

And regarding the deterministic builds: I call bullshit. They just don't want to follow the different packaging guidelines from the different operating systems, so they repackage everything. Now I have to trust them to keep all these dependencies up-to-date and I have to accept the unecessary bloat? No way.

> [build process]

I agree, the chromium build tooling is unfriendly af.

> I call bullshit

Lot of works goes into deterministic builds, have fun going down this rabbit hole: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=314403

> Now I have to trust them to keep all these dependencies up-to-date

Looks like it rolls on average every 10-20 minutes: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+log/HEAD/DEP...

> and I have to accept the unecessary bloat?

Ah yes, because all operating systems ship with a pristine installation of the latest pdfium.

> Lot of works goes into deterministic builds

That has nothing to do with their dependency management. In fact, if you link against system libraries, it should be simpler to get deterministic builds, as you have to build less.

Hey thanks for you and your team's hard work. I absolutely love the empowerment that electron provides.

Many of your critics are fallible but I will not spend time arguing, sadly. Yet,what do you think of TypeScript? It's a state of the art language feature wise (for it's rich type system)

Typescript goes in the right direction, but the last time I checked, its type system was mediocre at best.

> mediocre at best.

care to elaborate?

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