Hacker News Reader

Comment by ATsch | Hacker News Reader

People used to talk about Java in the same way people talk about electron now so I feel like that's a definite no.

Programs written in Java runs on top JVM. On the other hand programs written for Electron comes bundled with Chromium. And we all know how it manages memory.

The JVM is fast today after 25 years of optimization and some serious improvements in the underlying processors (even with the Moore’s law failure of maybe half that period).

It was not fast at all when the Java hype was peaking in the late 90s. I knew a dotcom era startup that replaced a bunch of Perl with Java and my friends complained it had fewer features and was much slower.

One wonders how fast Electron will be in 25 years, if it lasts that long.

Java's selling point was portability, and did it very well, it was faster than programs written in interpreted languages, well it was and still is slightly slower than programs written in C and likes.

Programs written on Electron rely solely on web technologies, I always avoid these programs, one simple chat application eats up to half a GB of memory, no I am not going to increase my machine's memory in order to run those programs.

The relative penalty for using Java over C is so much smaller than Electron over Java or Electron over C

For cases on the edge, the penalty for not using Electron is that you don't get to use the software at all, because the developer doesn't have the personnel or budget to port it to multiple platforms.

Real software that does a job you need it to do is much better than hypothetical software that will do the same job faster.

That's not really true. There's very few software that wouldn't exist if it weren't for Electron.

You don't need to port Electron tier-software. This was a solved issue long ago. Code it in Java, Python etc... Or Use Rust/C/C++ and a cross platform toolkit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com