[max_streese]

Is it just me or do others find the Electron bashing a little over the top as well?

I mean VS Code, Discord, Slack and Obsidian are all in very widespread use and work perfectly fine for me.

Are there alternatives to Electron that require less resources? Tauri seems to be proof that there are.

But I think there is real value in large communities and backing. Electron seems to work perfectly fine to me for everyday use as is evident by the applications mentioned above. I would personally choose Electron over Tauri even for greenfield projects, simply because Electron seems to power applications that are in much more widespread use.

[BiteCode_dev]

While I appreciate VSCode, I think Discord, Slack and Obsidian are not selling the platform at all. They feel sluggish and have poor ergonomics. Now the second one may or may not be attributed to Electron depending of if you buy the cultural thinggy, but the first one clearly is. Mumble is super reactive in comparison to them, and most note softwares dance around Obsidian.

Having a latency on local clicks and transitions is not my idea of fun.

VSCode is an outlier here. And it's getting slower and slower with age, while sublime text is getting faster.

[IceSentry]

These things are all very subjective. Not everyone is affected the same way by latency. I hear people complaining about it all the time on thw internet, but in practice I never notice it and I don't know anyone that does either. Ergonomics is the same, I think discord is really nice to use and all the alternatives I've used have been worse.

To be clear, your opinion is absolutely valid I just don't think they apply equally to everyone.

[Capricorn2481]

I can't imagine anyone calling Obsidian sluggish. Do you perhaps have a lot of plugins?

[creshal]

Discord is not working "perfectly fine" on desktop for many people. Usually, the browser version is faster, needs less resources, has fewer platform integration problems (mic/camera access etc.), and crashes less often. And has less critical security vulnerabilities, as a browser gets patched much faster than Electron in general, and Discord in particular (who tend to be on an older branch, due to some native C++ libraries, that as far as I can tell have no user-visible impact).

And VSCode has to be contrasted with Atom, which is the same but in so much worse: It takes a lot of effort to make Electron work well.

[255kb]

I maintain an open-source app built with Electron. It serves tens of thousands of users every months and nobody complained in 5 years that it is being built with Electron. Not saying that Electron is perfect, and that it couldn't be a bit more performant, but as a solo maintainer (and entrepreneur) it helps me ship something that save people time. The burden of maintaining an application is already huge. Having to juggle with multiple environments would be a hassle and I definitely wouldn't do it.

That being said, if a "drop-in" alternative would be available I would probably try to switch at one point. But the alternative would have to be on par with the ecosystem (including packaging, binaries signing, etc.), the community, the ease of use... I don't think there is such a thing yet.

The app, if you are interested: https://mockoon.com

[ohgodplsno]

Slack is currently eating 600MB of my RAM, for something I check maybe once an hour. You know what I'd like to use my RAM for instead ? Gradle. kotlinc. intellij. Things that I actually use to do my work, and not a bad IRC that wants to make me pay for the privilege of seeing old messages. Electron is a demonstration of laziness and a living proof that software companies do not give a single shit about their users and just want to push more crap, for cheaper, all the time.

[crubier]

> a living proof that software companies do not give a single shit about their users and just want to push more crap, for cheaper, all the time.

Exact opposite, to me Electron is the living proof that software companies correctly care a lot about building a product people want, and correctly realize that the large majority of people correctly do not care that one of their top productivity app uses $1 worth of RAM, but want the app to have the features and UX they need instead.

The irrational obsession of part of the Hacker News crowd for the RAM usage of web apps is borderline psychotic. Man, take a chill pill, go get more RAM for a couple bucks once every 3 years, and let the engineers focus on UX and features ok? I don't want my productivity app to be a codegolf exercise

[nottorp]

> Slack is currently eating 600MB of my RAM, for something I check maybe once an hour.

You forgot about the times when two or more of the electron applications you run because you have no other option decide to take 20% CPU each or more.

Even if you make it a point of pride to run a computer that eats power measurable in kilowatts per hour, that's bad when on battery at least.

And from the article:

> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron.

What's the difference? It will still end up eating all that ram and needlessly refreshing the cat gifs someone posted a day and a half ago.

[dathinab]

Idk. I have electron programs running which take up much less residual memory. I do have slack running in my browser thou and the whole browser running slack and outlock360 and a bunch of other tabs uses 600MB of residual memory of which ... 324MB is used by slack ... so I would say it's more of an slack then a electron problem. AFIK the overhead of electron is around 100MB per-program this is still bad, sure, but far less worse then what you describe.

[razemio]

I feel so too. There are currently no valid alternatives I know to electron. It is sad, but this is the current state of UI frameworks, if you are targeting cross-platform with identical look and feel.

Also electron comes with its own advantages which many on HN seem to forget.

code-server for instance was very easy todo, because vscode was build using electron. It runs virtually anywhere. Uses fewer resources then most WMs on a headless device if you need a full blown IDE.

[theappsecguy]

Electron is ok. Not the best, but not as bad as some people claim it is, though it varies app to app. I feel the same way about React Native.