Any tech college kid can write an app in common frameworks. I’ll admit llm code generators are great when they can translate electron apps to say tauri or even better to QT at reasonable cost :)
what’s are the alternatives? I want ease of writing UIs js/CSS/HTML gives, especially with frameworks like svelte.
A webpage.
I’d highly recommend Tauri. It’s much much much faster and you can use svelte for the front end and enjoy all of those benefits.
The “downside” is that all of the backend is written in rust which can be trouble to learn… (Downside is in quotes because rust is my favorite language and I would legally marry it if the law cared about the true meaning of love) However! If you don’t care much about the backend stuff or most of that is gonna be simple anyway… Just use it. It’s better in every way
Edit for context: I’m the lead developer of a “popular” (it’s as popular as you can be as a niche tool for a niche community) open source project that uses Tauri with a svelte front end and rust in the back end.
There’s also a Golang alternative that does not have 6 GiB build folders like Tauri / Tauri 2.
(Tauri generates like 3 MiB binaries. It’s the build folders that are huge. Also stay ready to compile huge Rust packages!)
Getting good is an alternative, coding will always be a trade between ease and quality. Super high level languages are super easy and accessible but the tradeoff is you have no idea what is actually happening on the backend nor much control of it and it requires bloated web engines to manage and run.
For anyone considering Electron: take a look at Tauri. It’s another way to build cross-platform apps with web tech. It will use the OS‘s web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium which results in much smaller binaries and faster startup times and less RAM usage. You can also write native code in Rust. It’s like Electron but good.
Bad for Linux at the moment…
That being said, it won’t improve just by saying it’s bad for Linux, if you work as a maintainer in a distro, or know a lot about Linux and rust to help their development then please reach out!!!
The sooner tauri is usable everywhere the more people will prefer it
I didn’t try out a Tauri app on linux yet, I just know that it’s generally supported. What doesn’t work (well) as of now?
First I’ve heard of this. What’s wrong on Linux?
Outdated theming and
several widgets(?)that aren’t implementedgeneral instability such as random crashes, code not behaving similarly to Mac or Windows, slowdowns, missing packages in builds, a lot of window resizing issues and uh, fuck load of appimage issues
There’s actually a pretty cool music player project I’m keeping an eye on called Audioling that’s built on Tauri. I currently use one called Feishin which is pretty good.
Yep, using Feishin as well. Audioling is a rewrite from the same dev.
That does seem like a good improvement.
HTML5 applications goddamn well ought to be first-class programs, as a totally platform-agnostic realization of Turing completeness.
Instead you get every application bundled with its own whole-ass operating system and virtual machine. For a fucking webpage. Yep! No other way to run that on a modern computer!
I think VSCode is the only stable electron application and even then it took them like 5 years to reach passable stability lol.
Used to crash and combust all the time when I first tried it.
Zed is native and it has way better performance! You can tell it’s not Electron!
GitHub Desktop works neatly
Electron apps are a crime against computing.
But I’ll build an electron app, and have support for Linux /s
will it also have blackjack and hookers?
It’ll only have blackjack and hookers.
Electron and unreal have been disasters for their industries
Bruh i rant against both weekley
Everything runs like shit now. My old xp retro gaming pc feels snappier than my new one.
Some people are still waiting on a text editor that never lags.
I think there’s a very large correlation between people that decide to use electron and people that write unusable, broken, tortoise-speed software.
Because it really doesn’t need to be slow for user-interacting software. In fact, I don’t think any platform exists that is so bloated that it can make modern computers slow for user-interaction.
How do you mean in terms of Unreal?
The issue isn’t the engine itself, but the management practices that lead companies to desire unreal.
Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter
When a team uses Unreal properly it can be great. Guilty Gear Strive is built in Unreal, has a beautiful unique visual style, and runs great. But you need a team who really knows what they’re doing, both on the code and art sides.
The problem is when an indie dev tries to use it and does everything “out of the box”. If you’re a solo or indie dev, just use Unity or Godot (I’ve been using the latter and loving it)
Unity is bad as a company but unreal runs poorly and yet is being used in a LOT of games for no reason. Similar to Electron.
I think a lot of the plugin tooling for Unreal promotes bad practices with asset management, GPU optimization, and memory management. I’m trying to say that it allows shitty/lazy developers and asset designers to rely on over-expensive hardware to lift their unoptimized dogshit code, blueprints, models, and textures to acceptable modern fps/playability standards. This has been prevalent for a few years but it’s especially egregious now. Young designers with polygon and vertex counts that are out of control. Extraneous surfaces and naked edges. Uncompressed audio. Unbaked lighting systems. Memory leaks.
My personal experience experimenting with Unreal (and all other engines I’ve tried) is the same as developing DNNs and parametric CAD modelling applications for my day job.
Effective resource, memory, and parallelism management from the outset of a project is, or should be, axiomatic. I think Unreal 5 runs exceptionally well when that’s the case. A lot of the time, one can turn off all of the extra hardware acceleration and frame generation AI crap if your systems are designed well.
I know this is a bit of an “old man yells at cloud” rant, but if one codes and makes models like ass, of course their game is gonna turn out like ass. And then they turn around and say “tHe EnGiNe SuCkS”.
No. Fuck you. You suck (at programming).
Unreal pushes a lot of “hip tech” that supposedly improves performance, but often it turns out that many example cases are just really poorly optimised. With more traditional optimization techniques more can be achieved.
Unreal can perform really, really well, it’s just that it won’t by default. And many devs are too lazy to properly profile their games to figure out how to improve it.
I hate both. Godot for lief
When gecko electron?
(Yes, I know that there has been effort to that, but at one point having gecko and FF seperate was too much work, so it was merged further, so that it’s now even harder to create a gecko-based electron. So basically just create a clean FF profile, add all addons you want (uBlock and noscript are useful for some apps), and make a desktop shortcut to open the web page in that specific profile. Funnily enough, it’s more lightweight!)
Can I get a browser built entirely on Electron?
XULRuner use to exist. I ran Chatzilla under it at one point in time.
I’m experimenting with a game and rather than deal with platform specific graphics I’m just targeting wasm and webgl and plan to embed my game in a browser runtime.
It feels less terrible than the mess that is linking platform specific logic and code.
The vast majority of game engines already have seamless cross platform support. Nothing need be done beyond selecting your target when compiling. Use Vulkan instead of dx11/12 and good to go
Or use a real cross-platform UI toolkit.
Like what?
One of them.
Do you have suggestions?
Last time I looked at QT I didn’t like it
For what it’s worth, I’m not looking at electron but something like an embedded browser mode. I think qt has that
I even forgot how that one i liked years ago was named. But Wikipedia has a (likely slightly outdated) list. Just google “cross platform ui toolkit”.
Qt is overkill if all you’re using it for is to create a window you render into, something like SDL would be better.
And yet, the most popular, and desired (and one of the most admired) IDEs that developers use all day, everyday, is built using Electron:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-integrated-development-environment
I’m keeping an eye on Zed: https://zed.dev/
Yeah, AI, whatever. It’s written in Rust and looks pretty great.
Yeah you can turn off the AI it’s not mandatory, besides, it’s really fast, has built in support for LSP’s , custom themes which are easy to make, vim mode out of the box, extensions, and some GitHub functionalities.
I was using Kate because electron is too much of a hog on my system and zed works insanely well (it’s slightly slower than Kate though but not very important)
I wish you could turn off the automatic downloads on zed though (or have a prompt to confirm the download) but it’s really shaping up to be a great text editor.
I’m currently mid-migration from Windows to Linux, so I have to wait until the Windows release or until I finish migrating (I’m not really up for building a beta at this point), but I’m very excited.
Did Zed devs fix vim mode? In the early stages I tried it and lots of movements weren’t the same as in vim, I still remember trying to jump a few screen down and it just deleted a few lines instead. Also didn’t really like that you couldn’t controll the menu on the left using vim movements like you can with vimtree, really makes it unusable if you have to jump around between your mouse and keyboard. Gotta check it myself I guess, hopefully they made it better
vscode isn’t an IDE, but an actual IDE written in electron would be horrible.I don’t want to argue about this anymore. I admit i had a bad take, and this whole thread is just arguing about semantics at this point. Does it even really matter if vscode is an IDE or not? If it works, it works.
What functionality is Vscode lacking for it to be an IDE?
IDEs come bundled with tooling, such as debuggers, intelligent code completion, and OOTB language support, and language servers.
vscode out of the box doesn’t have any of these, you install them with plugins. jetbrains products, for example would be IDEs, but editors like vscode and neovim aren’t. Those are code editors.
What’s different between Vscode and other editors like Vim is how easy it is to make it a fully fledged IDE. Usually a notification pops up about analyzers being available, and if you click accept it’s done. Just one click of a button.
With Vim it’s not that easy. You need to install many separate plugins just to make it a fraction of an IDE.
I agree. I was mainly thinking of neovim, but i guess vim works in this example, too.
I was talking about the base editor itself, though. In the end it doesn’t even matter what we consider VSCode to be, i feel this thread has just devolved into arguing about semantics and bikeshedding, and there’s no correct solution.
I think i’ll just be deleting my main comment, admit I had a bad take and move on. i’m tired of arguing about this.
Seems unnecessarily pedantic 🤷
I don’t think it really matters, but the implication you can write a whole IDE in electron is just insane.
It is pretty pedantic, i agree. I don’t want to start an argument about something as pointless as this, though.
But aren’t the plugins also basically part of the electron app after installing? But I have no idea how electron, vscode and their plugins acrually work.
Not really. there’s VSCode itself, and then there’s the extensions on top of it. But my main point was how vscode wasn’t designed to be an IDE, just a customizable code editor. Like neovim or emacs, you could customize it to the point of being similar to an IDE, but they’re still not considered IDEs.
I think that whether it needs plugins or not to do the job isn’t really relevant.
You can develop software in a large number of languages including writing the code (with intelligent code completion), building it, committing it to source control and running and debugging it.
If it didn’t use plugins to do that then it’d huge and take ages to start up.
I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I prefer how vscode does it. and i think you’re right.
You could call vscode a “DIY IDE Building Kit” because everybody is using it that way.
After you put all the extensions together you basically got a fully featured “IDE” for most languages out there.
Nobody I know uses vscode like a simple “code editor”.
I agree, neither do i. I was talking about base vscode, but i don’t think it even matters anymore. There’s really no proper answer. Some people use it like a notepad, some people use it like a fully fledged IDE. I’m just tired of arguing over this, and i admit i had a bad take.
Being good
Fuck M$
It’s literally listed in stack overflow’s section on IDEs, and functions as a replacement for an IDE. Insisting that it’s not an IDE in this context isnt helping anyone communicate, it’s just being pedantic.
They also list vim and notepad++ as IDEs, pretty sure they just meant code editors in general.
Fucking NANO is on the list 😂
This distinction is not useful since the creation of language servers.
Why is Spacemacs listed separately to Emacs when it’s just a fancy Emacs’ config?
