I've been building on Electron for the last 18 months (@Nylas), and it's really impressive how far it's come in the last year.
Coming from native Mac OS X development, Electron is an breath of fresh air. There's an incredible amount of energy and momentum in the web development community these days, and things like Flexbox, ES2016, React, and ESLint make it possible to ship fast and iterate quickly. Who would have thought JavaScript would be achieving what Java/Swing set out to do in the 90's?
I've had a chance to work with the core team on a handful of bug fixes and new features, and they've been incredibly kind and welcoming. I think Electron will go far as an open source project, and I'm excited that GitHub is growing it beyond Atom.
I would argue that what Java/Swing set out to do in the 1990's was done already. You can ship Swing apps and make lots of money selling them to lots of people - JetBrains being a case in point. You don't get many people starting new projects that way (and Swing has been replaced by JFX anyway), but this seems more related to fashion than the merits of the various technologies.
The energy and "momentum" in the web community is something that has been discussed extensively on HN and elsewhere, so I won't comment on that. Suffice it to say that motion is not always the same thing as progress.
Let's be fair and admit that the typical Java app doesn't have all the features of a modern Electron app.
For instance, I downloaded Atom and after starting it, it wanted to connect to atom.io and then Google analytics. Now Google not only knows which web pages one visits, but also which apps one uses. Electron is win/win - for web developers and Google, of course.
Hah. In fairness though, most apps do want to report back usage stats and other telemetry these days. That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.... though it's conventional for desktop apps to ask first (perhaps one reason people developers like web apps, the social conventions are different)
It is not allowed in the EU to gather data without informing the user and (in some cases) requiring opt-in. I think this is a very sane decision, even if it makes developers uncomfortable, because it is a privacy issue.
It is not usual to gather telemetry on the desktop, with perhaps the exception of some AppStore apps. Of course now that Microsoft got greedy and web developers are starting to develop desktop apps, we might see a different trend.
That depends on the data. I believe Atom uses the analytics privacy feature that deletes the last digits of the IP. That way it doesn't fall under the privacy directive.
Atom and Slack don't "feel" normal to me, they feel sluggish. They also take up a lot of resources (CPU, RAM). With what I'm running on a daily basis, I need all the resources I can get.
I think lpsz said it best, "It's cool for developers. It's not cool for the users". I'd qualify that with "It's cool for web developers".
Atom hovers at less than 5% usage between at least 5 separate workers for me. It's no 'ed' in terms of RAM but if it's under a gig it's fine by me. Certainly better than IntelliJ was in that respect.
Works pretty perfectly with rust as well. I have both a vim and an atom rust setup and they have near total feature parity.
I've experienced this with Atom. Seems to happen when the syntax highlighting code spikes the CPU usage as it attempts to highlight what you've typed and as a result the app waits for the highlighting code and your most recent keystrokes show up with a noticeable delay.
I had this with the ternjs plugin. Out of the box atom is pretty snappy on OS X. I haven't used Windows in a decade but I often see comparisons to Visual Studio accompanying complaints about Atom so my best guess is that it's either due to environment or a heavy plugin.
Coming from native Mac OS X development, Electron is an breath of fresh air. There's an incredible amount of energy and momentum in the web development community these days, and things like Flexbox, ES2016, React, and ESLint make it possible to ship fast and iterate quickly. Who would have thought JavaScript would be achieving what Java/Swing set out to do in the 90's?
I've had a chance to work with the core team on a handful of bug fixes and new features, and they've been incredibly kind and welcoming. I think Electron will go far as an open source project, and I'm excited that GitHub is growing it beyond Atom.
If you're in the SF Bay Area and interested in learning more about Electron, there's a meet-up coming up later this month! http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Electron-User-Group/