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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources.

Several things I can think of: "quantity is not quality"; JS developers far outnumber everyone; making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy, and they are not interested in platform-native functionality, preferring a "consistent" UI across platforms instead; "premature optimisation" dogma that means no one cares about efficiency anymore.

Microsoft Teams and (later versions of --- they actually moved away from perfectly decent native Win32) Skype also use Electron, and that's Microsoft. That says the size of the company and its resources matters little in things like this.

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Ehhh for Skype it's mostly a Skype thing. Pretty much every decision made about Skype be it platform, features, ... Is wrong. I'm convinced Skype within Microsoft is now some middle step they put their product managers through for a year or two without paying much attention to them, and each tries to implement his "own mark" on it as some sort of achievement. The alternatives to that theory are too scary.

I mean yeah, s4b is getting EOL'd in 2021 in favor of Teams

Will we get a new SKU? Teams... FOR BUSINESS!

> making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy

Its easy peasy with Qt as well. I am the only dev for https://www.sostronk.com/app and it looks (and behaves) _exactly_ as our designer wants it to. (Oh, and this is when I'm also spending time working on backend stories).

> no one cares about efficiency anymore.

That is not true. Discord and friends spend a lot of time for efficiency because they're using Electron. It is not impossible to have a (relatively) efficient application with Electron (VSCode for example), it just takes more effort. Compare that with Qt where performance is free of cost - in the last 5 years at SoStronk, I've hardly ever needed to spend dedicated effort for improving performance. Another example, and I wasn't aware of this till very recently, is the Telegram Desktop app which is Qt as well.

But yeah, I do agree with your first point, the only reason Electron is in use is because JS developers are a plenty. At the end, cost is the #1 thing when businesses make decisions.

But it's not clear that JS developers being plentiful actually reduces cost in the long (or even medium) term.

Wait, if Skype is Electron ... why can't I have Skype on Linux? Politics?

https://snapcraft.io/skype

I’ve been using Skype on Linux for years now. At least that we can thank Electron for.

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