Comment by briandear
Comment by briandear 3 days ago
I still don’t understand why we’re using any of these Electron-style “apps.”
Ship a web application, or write actual native apps. Electron and that flavor of “app” development is the worst of all worlds.
Just like the JavaScript web frameworks have turned what should be small web applications into huge monsters — Electron has made what should be relatively small, high performance applications into these bloated resource hogs.
I get it, JavaScript developers want to be part of the fun and there is definitely a use case for tiny resource-constrained startups still changing product-market fit. But companies like Slack for instance — worth billions of dollars and can’t find a way to write a high performance desktop app in Swift for MacOS instead opting for Electron.
Think of the climate! All that extra power required to run these resource hog Electron apps on tens of millions of computers isn’t trivial, not to mention a neutered user experience that results from not taking advantage of actual native applications.
JavaScript isn’t the panacea people want it to be.
Electron makes it easy for companies but it makes it rougher for the victims.
And Tauri and all the others are simply different flavors of the same shit sandwich.
Go to app store on your iPhone, swipe refresh and see how heavy all those native SwfitUI apps are and we are talking only about app updates. You will barely find app less than 100MB and few that are even 300MB+. Didn't check if they are also as heavy on desktop. So that's at least regarding app size on environment impact native apps at least using SwiftUI not making it better - I would say they make it even worse since javascript apps can just autoupdate non native part without downloading whole bundle (and I think this is what slack and discord doing for some updates). SwiftUI apps are also not as fast as UIKit apps not sure about memory performance.
In practise I will take any JetBrains IDE or VSCode over native XCode IDE anytime - XCode is such a big heavy hog.