Ask HN: What does the future hold for Electron? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does the future hold for Electron?

4 pointsvaughan3 comments

Microsoft owns Github. Github maintains Electron. Microsoft are moving Teams to use WebView2, sharing a single Chromium instance for all apps, reducing memory usage, which is the most common complaint for Electron.

This architecture has been obvious to everyone for a long time. Every Electron app could essentially be a webpage but with enhanced native API access.

Electron's future seems bleak. ESM support hasn't materialized (https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/21457). WebView2 will not be available on macOS until late 2022 [it seems](https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645#issuecomment-921551618).

Seems we are in one of these awkward transition periods, where you are forced to start a project on technology that you know will be deprecated in the near future sigh.

Anyone have insight/predictions?

where you are forced

Nobody is forced.

to start a project on technology that you know will be deprecated in the near future

There’s a lot of speculation in there.

What other MS products use Electron? VS Code does. My thought: Deprecating the thing that VS Code runs on - without a drop-in replacement - is unwise. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Microsoft is trying to move Code users to VS Community. And think about the extension ecosystem for Code. Other MS teams have built extensions for it - for example, their distro? (not exactly sure how it’s packaged) of Jupyter is based on Code which is based on Electron.

Re. EcmaScript Modules (aka ESM) they are experimental, and a Microsoft employee addresses their absence on that issue:

“FWIW, Electron won't be supporting Node 13 as our policy is to only roll in LTS versions of Node. So, while we definitely want to support ESM, this isn't going to be happening until Node 14.”

Also relevant: Submission of “Microsoft is ditching Electron for Teams”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28848715

They have a mega-patron in Slack

> Electron's future seems bleak.

Good, just use proper native cross-platform frameworks like Qt, Flutter, or Revery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com