Comment by rhl314

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Comment by rhl314

I am working on app that I wrote initialy in electron, but now have moved away from it.I have perspectives on both good and bad sides of electron

The good parts

Low barrier to entry - if you know javascript you are good to good. No need to learn C++ or Java for building a desktop app.

Truly cross platform - any platforms that chromium supports, electron supports

A very active ecosystem - The community around electron is amazing. I am a big fan of electron.build, things like code signing / auto updates etc are provided out of the box

The not so good parts

IPC hell

Electron has a main process and renderer process and they communicate via events. I found myself swimming in the event soup very often.

Easy to make mistakes

This is more for a note for me or any beginner, but it is easy to write compute heavy code in the renderer and make the ui unresponsive or sluggish. There are many other things like this where it is easy to do things the wrong way.

Security

Electron still has a capable browser which can open any webpage. Mix that with native access and you have a remote code execution vulnerability on your hands.

Bloated binaries

Even the simplest of the electron binaries are large, thats just the nature of electron.

Shameless plug

The app that I am working on is https://loadjitsu.com, I rewrote it using golang, couldnt be happier.

Replies rhl314 · 2022-03-26
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    About YAVCHN

    YAVCHN is a reader for Hacker News and Lobsters, with articles and discussions in separate windows or Classic pages.

    Created by Paul Parks and built with PUDL.

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    While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.

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    The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.

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