Literally anything is a good alternative to electron. One should prioritize the quality of the product, and use of electron gives the lowest quality product.
Flutter / Dart? It's compiled ahead of time and doesn't use an embedded browser so I'd expect it to be a lot lighter, though I haven't measured.
But the general lack of really cross-platform (desktop + mobile + maybe web) ecosystems is just as much as sign that devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves.
>at devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves.
This kind of misses out on a hierarchy of devs here and the amount of work to make it happen. Electron took a large chunk from a multi-billion dollar endeavor to use to make all this work. Electron only worked because Chrome was there. Chrome worked because Google already had unlimited money from advertising, and getting advertising on every device possible was their goal.
Devs might want light apps everywhere, but seemingly none are going to dedicate the rest of their life and money to make it work.
What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
>without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect.
People were copying code from SO since it became popular.
People are including node modules blindly before AI.
Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers.
Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.
First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method.
Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(
Created by an llm using a super computer cluster haha.
Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks?
People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative
Literally anything is a good alternative to electron. One should prioritize the quality of the product, and use of electron gives the lowest quality product.
VS Code is a fantastic Electron app
Both "works" and "reliably" are doing some really heavy lifting there.
Flutter / Dart? It's compiled ahead of time and doesn't use an embedded browser so I'd expect it to be a lot lighter, though I haven't measured.
But the general lack of really cross-platform (desktop + mobile + maybe web) ecosystems is just as much as sign that devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves.
>at devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves.
This kind of misses out on a hierarchy of devs here and the amount of work to make it happen. Electron took a large chunk from a multi-billion dollar endeavor to use to make all this work. Electron only worked because Chrome was there. Chrome worked because Google already had unlimited money from advertising, and getting advertising on every device possible was their goal.
Devs might want light apps everywhere, but seemingly none are going to dedicate the rest of their life and money to make it work.
2 replies →
Reliable as in "exposes the same bug across all platforms"?
Whats so unreliable about electron then?
If you are willing to ignore accessibility, your statement is right.
[dead]
What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
>without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect.
People were copying code from SO since it became popular.
People are including node modules blindly before AI.
Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers.
Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.
First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method.
Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(
2 replies →
Then they justify it because they vibe-coded a proof of concept in Tauri, and it was even worse.