Does it though? I understand the value that Electron brings, but at the same time, that doesn't make it immune to criticism. 100MB+ for every instance of a hello world application is stupid. It's because people thought it was stupid that the linked article and the software for it was written, and why it was posted on HN, and why it was upvoted.
You might not like that people have criticisms of Electron, but that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement, and certainly just jumping at this guys name rather than his argument makes your comment less valuable than his.
I personally believe the best move would be to make the Chromium engine shared across Electron instances. You can package Nodejs and Chromium as a shared library that every Electron app would then access.. And we have a 100MB footprint for having a single instance or a dozen instances, where the apps then compound on that themselves, rather than a linear relation of sandboxed instances.
And people stop using Electron apps because they tell you to download some system library of some sort separately which may be incompatible to the Electron app you're going to use by picking the newest one.
Then you may have to install another version of that system library. Who's going to do that?
We do it for websites, and here we're talking about Webkit, Edge, and whatever is on Linux (Webkit on many distributions?), while for any regular website you have to test against a dozen different browsers. Not to mention that many Electron apps are merely wrappers around already-working web apps that have been tested on different browsers.
If this can make Electron apps run fast, it's absolutely worth it.
Spotify is fine, but Atom and Hyper are about 100 times slower than Sublime Text and iTerm2.
Web sites and desktop apps are completely different... Web sites need to be slim or else people don't even bother to read your site but desktop apps, it's just one time download and each use has nothing to do with how fat the download was.
And Electron being 100x slower than Sublime Text is just way over exaggerated... Compare that to Visual Studio code too.
Why would you pick harder development over practically no gain?
By slower I don't mean that they take a long time to download, but that they run slowly, i.e. the performance is bad.
"100x slower" was a figure of speech. I know Atom is not 100 times slower (although sometimes it feels like it) ;-)
As for "Why would you pick harder development over practically no gain?", I think it's pretty clear: for those who know web technologies, using Electron to develop a desktop app makes for much easier development. That's what they gain from using it: being able to develop a desktop app versus not being able to.
with node-webkit you can just point nw.exe at a package.json allowing the user to just have a single node-webkit install and can run multiple apps.
https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/
What I would love to see is something that replaces Chromium with WebKit/Safari in Electron apps. I'm sure that'll make everything faster, or at least easy on battery life.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadYou might not like that people have criticisms of Electron, but that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement, and certainly just jumping at this guys name rather than his argument makes your comment less valuable than his.
I'm not saying that Electron shouldn't be criticized, just implied that saying it's stupid isn't very productive.
100MB sounds stupid but it's stupider to lose the cross platform compatibility when 100MB of space isn't really much on modern systems.
And people stop using Electron apps because they tell you to download some system library of some sort separately which may be incompatible to the Electron app you're going to use by picking the newest one.
Then you may have to install another version of that system library. Who's going to do that?
We do it for websites, and here we're talking about Webkit, Edge, and whatever is on Linux (Webkit on many distributions?), while for any regular website you have to test against a dozen different browsers. Not to mention that many Electron apps are merely wrappers around already-working web apps that have been tested on different browsers.
If this can make Electron apps run fast, it's absolutely worth it.
Spotify is fine, but Atom and Hyper are about 100 times slower than Sublime Text and iTerm2.
And Electron being 100x slower than Sublime Text is just way over exaggerated... Compare that to Visual Studio code too.
Why would you pick harder development over practically no gain?
By slower I don't mean that they take a long time to download, but that they run slowly, i.e. the performance is bad.
"100x slower" was a figure of speech. I know Atom is not 100 times slower (although sometimes it feels like it) ;-)
As for "Why would you pick harder development over practically no gain?", I think it's pretty clear: for those who know web technologies, using Electron to develop a desktop app makes for much easier development. That's what they gain from using it: being able to develop a desktop app versus not being able to.