Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why(www.windowslatest.com)
41 pointsby thunderbong2 hours ago13 comments
  • cheschirean hour ago
    I'm pretty sure this was known since the early days of Electron. It was even one of the chief complaints about VS Code when it was first launched.

    Electron's value prop has always been about having one team producing one app that is supported on multiple platforms with minimal additional effort.

    This article does nothing to address that.

    • tekla16 minutes ago
      The problem is that it made everyone's life worse.
      • johnh-hn3 minutes ago
        Not mine. I loathe Electron like many people. But, as someone who is legally blind and has very limited vision, being able to have custom UI zoom levels, per application, has made my life much easier.

        For a long time, and mostly out of frustration, I wanted to build my own stack of software around my vision. But the mammoth amount of effort it would require meant I never went through with it.

    • RunSet18 minutes ago
      > Electron's value prop

      "Now you can have the cross-platform compatibility of a single-page application just by bundling Chrome."

  • LaurensBERan hour ago
    Electron is pretty awesome in that it allows a small team to build a decent GUI app using their existing web skillset but it also feels like it's time for something better at this point.

    With the ram prices as crazy as they are. It's pretty frustrating to have to run multiple GB eating applications just to do some basic tasks (90% is read and write messages, in the case of Discord). I understand that other people might use the more advanced features (voice chat, etc) but these could be loaded on-demand.

    It's a bit crazy to me that I can comfortable run an entire Linux stack (+ Podman, monitoring, alerting and multiple services) in 512 MB ram (with 40% free, just checked!). However my Windows PC needs 5.5GB just to show the desktop! Realistically it needs somewhere between 8GB and 16GB for some basic web browsing and even then it can feel slow if you have a few apps like Discord running in the background.

    • pasc187816 minutes ago
      Sorry can you show a decent GUI app in Electron compared with a native one.

      You show this by all your other comments on memory. The reason apps take memory is Electron.

      Plus I prefer apps that behave like OS native apps not the reduced GUI of web apps.

  • smusamashahan hour ago
    We have gotten so used to slow app startup these days I believe. I have recently started using Task Slinger [1] and every single time I boot it, I get a feeling that it was already running and it's window just showed up. I wish all modern software were like this.

    [1]: https://taskslinger.net/

    • swinglock14 minutes ago
      All modern apps are like this. It's Electron apps which are all legacy.
  • bemtevi36 minutes ago
    I've rarely liked any Electron apps, both for the performance and because it seems to encourage a feeling of bloatedness, for want of a better word. Tried VS Code, but dropped it when they started putting too much AI in it and too much complexity. Sublime is so much better.

    I don't know...there seems to be something unpleasant about all Electron apps.

  • Neywinyan hour ago
    They keep talking about 2 accounts logged in so that's why it's still high. But they've done nothing to defend that claim.

    Also, pro tip, you can still just use it in browser. I hope that doesn't go away.

  • kryptonomistan hour ago
    Let’s hope we see a new wave of desktop apps rewritten natively, thanks to LLMs. Whether they use Rust with GPUI, C++ with Dear ImGui, or something else entirely, that would be great. Personally, I’m so fed up with bloated UIs. Windows is full of them, and it’s a pity considering how powerful our CPUs are.
    • r_leean hour ago
      > C++ with Dear ImGui

      it would be absolutely awful

      compared to chromium, it's really limited, like it's just always a compromise with these

      we should instead figure out a way to do electron but better and make it easier to do the things you can do with e.g. React with native languages and frameworks

      • debazel17 minutes ago
        The limitations are a large reason for why they're so resource efficient in the first place.

        If you just reimplement Electron in a native language then you get... Chrome, which is already written in C++. The majority of RAM usage in Electron applications is from the native parts of Chrome itself and a decent ~40 MiB chunk for the Node.js runtime.

      • amelius37 minutes ago
        QtQuick is quite good.
      • caspper6911 minutes ago
        I have had excellent results running a back-end Rust process that communicates with a C# Avalonia front-end via protobufs over named pipes on Windows and Domain Sockets on Linux and MacOS. With C# AOT I’ve been able to create self-contained apps that run incredibly fast despite the ipc between the front end and the rust core. I’m getting full 6 platform coverage too (Win/Linux/macOS on both x64 and arm64).
    • cpursley21 minutes ago
      Crux, lets you use native UI but Rust for business layer: https://github.com/redbadger/crux
    • airstrike37 minutes ago
      or Rust with things other than GPUI
  • cpursley22 minutes ago
    Great option for this that lets you use Rust along with real native UI for cross platform: https://github.com/redbadger/crux
  • petterroeaan hour ago
    It's hard to say "Discord just showed why" before the product is in production and sees actual use. Promising initial statistics, but the transition is based on a lot of assumptions that won't really be proven until mass adoption and the software has seen long-term maintenance.
    • flohofwoe25 minutes ago
      ...exactly, and at some point you want to show inline animations or videos and all sorts of other media, show webpage previews, play audio snippets and all the other things things a webpage can do, and then you're back to either integrating a browser engine or attempt to write one from scratch (the browser engine can of course be provided by the system webview, e.g. what Tauri does).
      • goalieca11 minutes ago
        I’ve programmed inline video players for 25 years. Same with audio and everything else. We had “accelerated” graphics back with winxp and gdi+ and of course OpenGL over ssh with x11. Browser preview pages in most apps are usually snippets of text and maybe an icon or pic. Not rendering a full page.

        In a way, applications regressed a lot with react native and electron. I get it’s easier to develop but the apps are very bloated and underperforming even on computers with 10-100x more power.

  • opengrassan hour ago
    Signal is still dragging Electron, can't have a working FreeBSD port due to dependency hell. Also VSCode.
  • LoganDarkan hour ago
    I would not add alternative accounts to the account switcher, they've used these to coordinate bans ever since the account switcher's inception.
  • itopaloglu83an hour ago
    On another note, Microsoft Teams and new Outlook use very little amount of memory on paper, because their main windows show up under the Edge name. It’s a Microsoft way of solving the high ram usage problem.
    • goda90an hour ago
      WebView2. Other applications can also use it but it seems like there's less out-of-the-box functionality than Electron
    • senorrib34 minutes ago
      That’s also how Tauri claims to use so little ram.
    • jasonvorhe42 minutes ago
      By being dishonest and misleading?
      • pwg16 minutes ago
        When has Microsoft not been dishonest and misleading? Being dishonest and misleading has been Microsoft's entire game plan since all the way back into the Bill Gates era.
  • lukaslabs_devan hour ago
    [flagged]
  • bdhcuidbebean hour ago
    [dead]