
Ask HN: Why does everyone hate Electron? - zabana
Is it really that bad ?<p>The argument that it&#x27;s too memory hungry does not sound strong enough to me since most of us (I&#x27;m making assumptions here, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m way off the mark) run powerful hardware (at least 8GB of RAM).<p>I don&#x27;t know, maybe I&#x27;m just in my own bubble but I&#x27;m interested to know your thoughts.<p>And if you have built a successful Electron product, what&#x27;s your experience ? Would you do it again ?
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Piskvorrr
You are in your bubble indeed.

\- Sure, _my_ computer has 16GB. The computer I develop on, plus run a couple
VMs, containers, etc. That is not the case for the common user, who has to
make do with less. This is especially palpable on mobile, with less RAM, fewer
cores and more throttling.

\- And those 16 GB? Nope, I do not intend to squander them _on your app_ , and
neither do the users. We _use_ the computers, y'know. Perhaps to run an IDE,
perhaps to watch a movie, perhaps to make a spreadsheet, but most apps are an
_addition_ to the main task. This is the epitome of arrogance: "you have X of
resource, AND IT'S ALL MINE!" And you have 30 such intents-to-munch competing.

\- Most of the time, it's a massive overkill: case in point, Slack: 2 billion
bytes of RAM to show a chatroom, i.e. a few thousand bytes of mostly text?
EXCUSE ME?!

\- Apart from that, and the overhead of bundling and running a separate
browser for each app, with all the issues it entails, the _theoretical_ idea
of desktop-web apps is quite appealing, as opposed to its actual
implementations. For prototypes, excellent; don't shove prototypes to
production though, that passes the buck onto end users.

I have built a major app in HTA (way before Electron, similar in principle).
1*, would not build again: easy to build, and that's about it.

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jjaredsimpson
Electron hate is an entry in the genre, "modern software is inefficient and
bloated because devs are lazy"

This genre will never want for new entries because, devs will keep getting
things done and critics will keep complaining.

Electron hate is a moral argument, "devs are wasteful." It's not a technical
argument. People confuse their ability to conceive of software which has the
same behavior as shipped software, but improves on arbitrary figures of merit,
excepting "date of RTM."

~~~
Piskvorrr
Modern software is inefficient because this is a cost-effective approach to
building software. Wherever you can't pretend you have infinite resources,
this attitude instantly evaporates. In other words, bloat matters to users,
but not to whoever directs development (spoiler: that's rarely developers).

