> And IMHO, electron should be killed!! It's really a bad bad idea. You have > like 10 single apps that run a full V8/node stack. Atom, Discord, > LightTable, Chrome itself...it's so RAM & CPU consuming. For me it is like > saying that a desktop application is pure front-end development. > best >
The appeal of electron is not that it will be very good performance wise but that its much easier for a web dev to move his/her web app to desktop with minimum amount of effort. Of course minimum effort has the side effect of lousy performance but in the case of apps like Discord which they do not do much its ok. So electron makes sense. Whether we should support such a framework is something that is up to the Pharo devs themselves. Take a look at Ruby on Rails, it was started from a single person for his own needs. Like many of our own Pharo libraries. You make something you need, you release it and if people find it useful they will contribute , if not its still useful to you ;) Such libs/tools like Electron have zero appeal to us desktop developers mainly because even web devs do not like web development for the known problem it has. Also web devs tend to over exaggerate about the appeal of individual web frameworks , I read an article making the bold claims of massive success for Node.js as a server API , I did some research and I came in front page evidence of massive failure, servers remain firmly committed to Apache which yes its written in C. Not that I doubt for a second that an API for a dynamic language would be able to compete with the behemoth of performance that C really is on its own field, obviously servers needs top performance because of the big load they have to manage. I enjoy ninja attacking such web posts and expose them for what they really are, fake. The other day another web dev made the bold claim that web games are on the rise, took me a second to do my research and find one of the most highly regarded research surveys in game industry that clearly show not only that web games are no more than 4% but they going straight to the hell of 0%. Apparently the one ones excited to play games inside the web browser are web devs that want to make blog post with ridiculous claims. Web remains and will remain strictly inside the web browser, outside it, very few people like it and actually choose it as they are preferred way of development. The same way none would pick C/C++ for a non performance orientated app well at least most logical people, unless of course there is a very good reason for such a choice. Of course C devs do not feel the need , at least AFAIK , to exaggerate the usefulness of their own language in blog posts with zero reference to actual reliable sources. But they are no angels either. Personally I think the future of the Web which will only grow in popularity will be outside the browser and already desktop apps have taken advantage of this. We see this a lot with mobile apps that steal away the users of web browsers. How many people use the web browser to like and chat on facebook compared to the ones using the native mobile clients ? Not many.
