> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well
And hopefully kill Electron.
I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.
> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well
And hopefully kill Electron.
I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.
As if native apps are any better. Books app on my mac takes 400MB without even having a single book open.
Won't happen. People are ok with swapping to their SSDs, Macbook Neo confirms that
It's happening. Cursor 3 moved to rust. A lot of people are using Zed (rust) instead of vscode.
It won't be "happening" until Slack, Teams, and Discord leave Electron behind. They are the apps that need to be open 24/7.
It's not entirely clear what the connection is.
We're not doing Electron because some popular software also using it. We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.
> web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.
May I never have to use or work on your project's software.
"I would rather spend the user's money than my engineer's time"
Teams works similarly in browser tab and "natively". Slack was similar if I remember correctly.
You should check the memory use of that browser tab. You’re not saving much either way running in a browser or in Electron, which is effectively a browser.
I only ever use Discord in a browser window.
Are you sure about Cursor? I haven't seen anything about that, I think it's still based on VSCode/electron.
"cursor 3" is just a landing page. The editor is still the old vscode fork...
The point is being able to write it once with web developers instead of writing it a minimum of twice (Windows and macOS) with much harder to hire native UI developers.
There is native to the OS and there's native to the machine.
Anyways, I'm both cases you don't really have to write it twice.
Native to the OS: write only the UI twice, but implement the Core in Rust.
Native to the machine: Write it only once, e.g. in iced, and compile it for every Plattform.
And HTML/CSS/JS are far more powerful for designing than any of SwiftUI/IB on Apple, Jetpack/XML on Android, or WPF/WinUI on Windows, leaving aside that this is what designers, design platforms and AI models already work best with. Even if all the major OSes converged on one solution, it still wouldn't compete on ergonomics or declarative power for designing.
Lol SwiftUI/Jetpack/WPF aren’t design tools, they’re for writing native UI code. They’re simply not the right tool for building mockups.
I don’t see how design workflows matter in the conversation about cross-platform vs native and RAM efficiency since designers can always write their mockups in HTML/CSS/JS in isolation whenever they like and with any tool of their choice. You could even use purely GUI-based approaches like Figma or Sketch or any photo/vector editor, just tapping buttons and not writing a single line of web frontend code.
Who said anything about mockups? Design goes all the way from concept to real-world. If a designer can specify declaratively how that will look, feel, and animate, that's far better than a developer taking a mockup and trying their hardest to approximate some storyboards. Even as a developer working against mockups, I can move much faster with HTML/CSS than I can with native, and I'm well experienced at both (yes, that includes every tech I mentioned). With native, I either have to compromise on the vision, or I have to spend a long time fighting the system to make it happen (...and even then)
well, then you are really bad at native and should not be comparing those technologies despite your claims otherwise (which make little sense).
> really bad at native
Yikes. I spent 15 years developing native on both mobile and desktop. If you think that native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS, you're objectively wrong.
By design, each operation system limits you to their particular design language, and styling of components is hidden by the API making forward-compatible customisation impossible. There's no escaping that. And if you acknowledge that fact, you can't then claim native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS. If you don't acknowledge that fact, you're unhinged from reality.
There's pros and cons to the two approaches, of course. But that's not what's being debated here.
The real disconnect is that the user doesn't really care all that much. It's mostly the designers who care. And Qt for example but also WPF let you style components almost to unrecognizable and unusable results. So if everyone will need to make do with 8GB for the foreseeable future, designers might just be told "No.", which admittedly will be a big shock to some of them. Or maybe someone finally figures out how to do HTML+CSS in a couple of megabytes.
You mean the point is to dump it all on the end user's machine, hogging its resources.
It's bad enough having to run one boated browser, now we have to run multiples?
This is not the right path.
As the kids say: skill issue!
The point is you can be lazy and write the app in html and js. Then you dont need to write c, even though c syntax is similar to js syntax and most gui apps wont require needing advanced c features if the gui framework is generous enough.
Now that everyone who cant be bothered, vibe codes, and electron apps are the overevangelized norm… People will probably not even worry about writing js and electron will be here to stay. The only way out is to evangelize something else.
Like how half the websites have giant in your face cookie banners and half have minimalist banners. The experience will still suck for the end user because the dev doesnt care and neither do the business leaders.
Syntax ain't the problem. The semantics of C and JS could not be more different.
But the point isn’t that they’re more different than alike. The point is that learning c is not really that hard it’s just that corporations don’t want you building apps with a stack they don’t control.
If a js dev really wanted to it wouldn’t be a huge uphill climb to code a c app because the syntax and concepts are similar enough.
Honestly C and JavaScript could hardly be more different, as languages.
About the only thing they share is curly braces.
Yeah JS is closer to lisp/scheme than C (I say this as someone who writes JS, Clojure and the occasional C).
What "advanced features" are there to speak of in C? What does the syntax of C being similar to JS matter?
This comment makes no sense.
Well theres the whole c89 vs c99. I’ll let you figure the rest out since it’s a puzzle in your perspective.
You do need a couple framebuffers, but for the most part yeah...
Who cares about 300Mb, where is that going to move the needle for you? And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language then 300Mb is a price more than worth paying. Likewise if the alternative is the app never getting started, or being single-platform-only, because the available build systems suck too bad.
There ought to be a short one-liner that anyone can run to get easily installable "binaries" for their PyQt app for all major platforms. But there isn't, you have to dig up some blog post with 3 config files and a 10 argument incantation and follow it (and every blog post has a different one) when you just wanted to spend 10 minutes writing some code to solve your problem (which is how every good program gets started). So we're stuck with Electron.
> And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language
and if not?
> and if not?
If the alternative is memory-safe and easy to build, then maybe people will switch. But until it is it's irresponsible to even try to get them to do so.
Until? Just take what's out there - it's so easy to improve on Electron
Like what? Where else (that's a name brand platform and not, like, some obscure blog post's cobbled-together thing) can I start a project, push one button, and get binaries for all major platforms? Until you solve that people will keep using Electron.
There are quite a few options. Many of them look dated though. I think that's the usp of electron.
There's a world of difference between using a memory safe language and shipping a web browser with your app. I'm pretty sure Avalonia, JavaFX, and Wails would all be much leaner than electron.
The people who hate Electron hate JavaFX just as much if not more, and I'm not sure it would even use less memory. And while the build experience isn't awful, it's still a significant amount of work to package up in "executable" form especially for a platform different from what you're building on, or was until a couple of years ago. And I'm pretty sure Avalonia is even worse.