What if the developer was 16 and this was the first thing they had ever made and they were super proud of being able to get something out the door? Read HN and then never made anything again. That happened to me with music when I was young, so discouraging and missed out on an awesome hobby in my 20s and am thankful I had the courage to pick it back up. The tone some folks take in this community often make me want to leave and never come back. I always hedge towards empathy when I don't know the developer personally.
Oh come on. Half this thread is praise for the app. This one post is about how he picked a terrible technology. He'll live. Best case scenario, he'll even learn a valuable lesson, to not use Electron.
This app took at least many months of work of the developer, who, by the way, is giving it for free. No need to be harsh or disqualify him. IF you dont like it, move on.
There is nothing wrong in using Electron. What if Electron folks release a JRE sort of thing - a one time install that can support multiple Electron apps by sharing the underlying Chromium libraries. At that point we can bring down the app size to couple of mbs at max. And we can keep the same codebase without changing a single line of code.
Regarding memory usage, it is indeed a memory hog and would require at least 100mb of memory per app. The only way we can see an improvement there is the Chromium guys doing some serious tuning to reduce the memory usage(Leakage perhaps?). Also not sure if we can even share the runtime between processes (Like windows dll), if that is possible, then we can hope to even bring the memory usage down.
Instead of forcing developers to learn different programming language and APIs for each operating system, we should as a community think about improving ways to make Electron or something similar even better.
This would be pretty amazing, to have a shared base.
Considering the amount of Electron apps that I've now installed I must have at least a couple of gigabytes dedicated to just hundreds of copies of Chromium.
How ironic is it that if the OP, and those supporting them, had spent some time and not taken the easy route they could have rewritten their entire idea in a constructive way which would have not set off the shit storm occurring on this post...
They could've said it nicer, but i don't think there's a constructive way to say "either rewrite it without electron or start whittling down the electron code-base to remove all the stuff your app doesn't use".
Not true, they could express that very idea and give their reason behind it. Plenty of people agree and use things from Suckless on Arch. Others simply prefer native experiences.
The fact is that it's harder to explain that constructively, but that's kind of ironic coming from people saying the Developer took the easy way out.
The only useful feedback here is "throw it away and start from scratch without chrome". This is however not "constructive feedback". And wrapping it in any layer of nice words won't change its core nature of not being constructive.
