Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?

Really? I still find it difficult to get a laptop with more than 16 GB of memory.

13" MBP maxes out at 16 GB. 14" does have 32 for $500 more, which might be ok for a company but is certainly a lot for me to spend personally just so I can run Electron apps comfortably. Non Apple laptops are similar.

If I'm buying a laptop instead of a Desktop, its for the ability to conveniently bring it with me when I'm not at home. For that, 13" is my preferred form factor. So at least Apple and Dell laptops, I have not seen one with more than 16 GB. I feel its unreasonable to expect me to sacrifice physical comfort just so apps can be written to use Electron.

For instance, I'm quite happy with Obsidian too, it's fast and snappy.

What's important to the majority of computing tasks is boring, doesn't need super computer sppeds or IoT sized products This lament is really narrow sighted.

Resources are cheap for the majority

Awwhhh why so glum? This sounds so alarmed, so fraught & bleak!

I don't see anyone as having a bead yet on what the final destination is, on what is right or perfect. I see change & innovation & exploration as necessary, ongoing, and this layering of platforms atop each other is part of that larger bigger quest for us all to learn what serves ourselves well, to figure out how we align.

Overall these Adapter layers are quite performant, quite fast, and they isolate rather than leak complexity quite effectively. Electron's doesn't have to invent a ton of stuff to create this pleasant, familiar environment for developers or users- the operating system is simply not that relevant, is easily adapted, by a pretty boring regular programming language (Node.JS) and the world's most popular multimedia page/resource system (the browser).

Right now, yes, we have the web platform as a layer above native in many cases, but I'm not sure that that is so alarming. Maybe it's transitional? The early smartphones were both enormously web first, decided to use something great rather than reinvent: the Palm Pre and original iPhone (which was webapps only). In modern times, there's ChromeOS, and Palm's webOS continues under new stewartship, mainly on TVs. If the complaint is layers of complexity, maybe we just need to get rid of proprietary & legacy platforms, & embrace the common, shared medium that all computing has. Or find new unifying better platforms!

In general, I see these new platforms as being extremely liberating, as helping reduce the complexity developers have to mess with, by offering a set of well-defined standards & well known constraints & behaviors. Rather than a complicated, particular OS tied to some specific devices, with it's own quirks, with ever evolving platform capabilities & changing toolchain

> If this is what software development has become, then there's no way it won't end in total and utter disaster when people start to recognize the already all too common piss poor products that barely manage to do the absolute minimum and rebel against them. It may not be marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation who'll be lined up against the wall first, but software developers when the revolution comes.

Again I think moderation is good council here, but I also agree in principle that there is some awareness software can be a bit of a disaster, and it's visible that sometimes updates & "improvements" serve external interests not the users.

Where I differ is I see Electron as a fairly hopeful, possible open future for computing, that does embrace users, more so than most software. Most software is not malleable, not adaptable. Electron, on the other hand, offers the very slick, open ended DevTools Protocol for most every app, which allows users control & automation & expansion of software. We can write some userscript & change the behavior of webplatform & electron systems, which is hugely powerful, is a far fairer shake & far more liberty than most computing platforms, where apps are usually compiled down, fixed in form & nature.

This second paragraph really brings me back to where we started: I don't think we have a bead yet, as a larger world. It feels like there's so much discovery, so much understanding to develop. What makes me hopeful is groups like https://wicg.io , which try to understand & consider how we might do better, which work to build open standards for the internet, for our shared multimedia pla...

Nah. It means many projects don't have strict performance requirements. Mediocre performance, high impact on battery life, slower startup times are OK for these folks. In return they gain cross platform support, quicker development cycles, etc.. There's nothing wrong with making these tradeoffs.

If you think about ui in OSes, they are different, quite a bit. Still similar in some way, but different.

Given that, one solution when you have similar things that are actually different (e. g. PS3 and PS5 are both consoles that run videogames, from the same company, but are incompatible),is to ship a vm. Make things run there and use it.

Chromium is that VM.

Bingo.

I don't understand why people keep failing to learn this lesson.

Java became popular because Sun drove it to become default installed on lots of enterprise computers. Python later became popular because if you had a standalone computer you had "batteries included" so you had the same stuff always installed.

And what people keep forgetting is that Electron is the low friction way of supporting Linux and macOS--whom most programmers would mostly like to ignore. If you write your app in Electron, you write on Windows, claim you support Linux and macOS and then ignore them.

I started off as a desktop publisher, moved up to graphic designer in the creative hub of my country, doing 3d design and video editing, from there I moved to animation and then to user interface design. throwing around 'webshit' is elitist at best and derogatory at worst. As if lack mental ability to do your job? Can you do mine?

You dont see any of us throwing around 'backend-bellend' when talking about fellow programmers.

respect the field, we are all in it.

It bothered me so little that overall Flutter seemed way simpler to me than the web-tech stack because I had also very little experience with web apps.

I think any current experienced software developer can easily switch between 3 or 4 popular languages, and pick up Dart quickly too since it's not that different from everything else out there. Dart is not Brainfuck or Lisp.

What would you say is the pros and cons of Sciter?

Is it so lightweight as it claims?

So yeah, I still greatly prefer desktop applications to use native UI's and prefer to avoid browser applications where I can. But its becoming increasingly hard.

Of course, I, too, am building browser things, since that's what the industry seems to demand, so I'm not really helping the situation. I do keep meaning to learn Flutter though.

I'm confused by this phrase. Wouldn't it have a 'huge attack vector space' ? I never really understood that phrase.

I'd rather build an app that doesn't require me to start with the question "which OS and window environment are you using?" followed by "sorry, we couldn't afford to build for that".

The idea that app developers have resources, skills and manpower to build ~3-7 UIs using ~2-3 different stacks – for exactly the same app – is imo more preposterous imo than assuming most users have enough ram to run a chrome+node instance.

The failure of standardizing UI has led to this. Electron is a stop-gap, a good one. As a Linux user, I am very happy that Electron exists, otherwise I would have far fewer apps.

Yes, Electron hogs resources. I am personally using Tauri, which has a much lower footprint. Importantly, I can write my app once.

This means you’ll be limited to the intersection of features of each platform native rendering engine.

On the other hand you get the union of all bugs and performance issues over each native rendering engine on each platform.

Text will be a particular nightmare, what browsers do in terms of pixel consistent yet native-feeling text rendering and input is a miracle.

> citation needed. why do slack and discord - communication applications - need a web view component?

Perhaps those apps specifically don’t use it, but it is a standard component and all modern UI toolkits are expected to have one because many apps do need this functionality.

YouTube/SoundCloud/Spotify/etc embeds would need a webview component if Discord was a native desktop app.

Electron hasn't been too bad, I've been able to construct a quick prototype which will prove if people are interested in what it does. I'd ultimately like to build a native app though.

[1] https://github.com/Rodeoclash/vodon-pro

Even with React wrapper, consider the differences and additional learning curve:

Example from https://react.nodegui.org/docs/guides/styling :

  import React from "react";
  import { Renderer, Text, Window } from "@nodegui/react-nodegui";
  const App = () => {
    return (
      <Window>
        <Text style={textStyle}>{"Hello World"}</Text>
      </Window>
    );
  };
  const textStyle = `
    color: green; 
    background-color: white;
  `;
  Renderer.render(<App />);

  ReactDOM.render(
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>,
    document.getElementById('root')
  );

Unfortunately, yes, and we've been there for a while.

>The QT stuff is familiar to me (from python mostly), but I have only very barebones knowledge of HTML/JS and almost none of the DOM and CSS.

Feel free to join the rest of us dinosaurs out on the patio to watch the world burn.

For the web developers who want to re-use their existing frontend skills of Javascript+HTML+CSS to create cross-platform desktop executables ... instead of learning a different GUI toolkit such as C++ QT, or C# Winforms WPF, or Java SwingGUI, Pascal Delphi, etc.

The op's links of Electron alternatives based on Qt do offer re-use of Javascript skills but I guess that's not enough of a compelling value proposition to gain mindshare.