We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16975199 and marked it off-topic.

Please stop censoring views that don't align with the hackernews majority. Just because these complaints are so common that HN hipsters now like to hate on them does not invalidate them.

This seems contradictory, since hipsters would never align with the majority.

This is an "all my friends voted for..." argument.

Electron applications such as Slack, Discord, and VS Code have ballooned in popularity over the last year or two. Hacker News comments are not representative of the whole.

It is not about popularity, it is about the resources Electron apps use vs native. The apps that you mentioned do not have good native alternatives. I cannot see anyone preferring a native app over Electron app if both offer the same features.

I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is, etc.

>I prefer VS Code over native alternatives.

That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.

If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

> If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

Is it possible that VS Code (for example) exists (in its feature specific incarnation ) only because Electron is a cost cutter in terms of portable development?

In other terms: Maybe the portable native full featured VS Code is the middle of the cheap-fast-good venn diagram.

>Is it possible that VS Code (for example) exists (in its feature specific incarnation ) only because Electron is a cost cutter in terms of portable development?

It could -- though I doubt it.

But I was concerned with a more limited question: if there was a good VS Code alternative that's native, would many still prefer an Electron version?

> But I was concerned with a more limited question: if there was a good VS Code alternative that's native, would many still prefer an Electron version?

I understood what you meant. I respect you disagreeing with my premise, but in the scenario where that premise is true, your question is not applicable.

Scenario: Would anyone choose MDF boards at IKEA if they could choose plywood or natural wood, or assemble their own furniture if given the choice (at the same price)? Barring a few applications, probably not. But IKEA wouldn't be IKEA if they were just another producer of wood furniture, meaning they got to market and stayed there because of the shortcuts and limitations they could justify when reaching a price.

Same thing here (IMHO). VS Code could have some cross-platform code and some platform specific code, but the cost would be higher and the output velocity would likely be lower. Assuming that is true, your question is misleading, albeit not on purpose.

Most people wouldn't care unless there was a performance difference between the two.

> That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.

There is sublime text.

Which is what I use. But ST3 doesn't have the full power of a 20+ strong MS team behind it, but a single person (and another hired to help here and there), and so doesn't have the same momentum -- and it's getting behind in features as well.

I never kept tabs on the development effort on neither VSCode nor Sublime Text, but it was always my impression that much of the power either editor has comes from 3rd party extensions rather than the editor core. As such, I believe it was the hype around Atom and VSCode that drove people to write extensions for them, leaving ST behind.

>but it was always my impression that much of the power either editor has comes from 3rd party extensions rather than the editor core

A lot of it, yes. But VSCode also invests a lot in core functionality (in what in other platforms would be plugins). The Git integration is one such example -- or the ability to debug Chrome in it.

>>I prefer VS Code over native alternatives.

>That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.

But that's not true. I use Sublime Edit and have happily used BBEdit and TextMate. Emacs is fine for many people, and I still use vim for fast edits in terminal mode all the time. There are plenty of other great native editors for just about all platforms.

BBEdit is excellent. So is Notepad++.

I prefer Sublime Text.

Do you mean, you cannot see anyone preferring an Electron app over a native app?

That's almost never the choice though is it? Who offers an Electron app and a native app?

So the choice becomes use an Electron app or something else entirely.

The choice is actually more interesting. Although big companies such as Slack potentially have resources to support development for multiple platforms, even they can implement new features faster due to Electron. Think about all those small teams that just wouldn’t be able to port their apps anywhere without it.

So in some ways I’d probably prefer a good Electron app.

For this, a mail client, I doubt there'd actually be much saving going native - it's going to need browser level HTML either way. So here Electron may have negligible cost. Thunderbird easily goes over 300M when it's been running a while for instance.

For other things I'm far less keen as Electron is often a sign of a needless memory hog - 100M pomodoro timers and such like.

Probably. Spark takes up around 200M on my laptop, so it's not that big of a deal.

Nobody, but many offer an Electron app for things where equally good native apps exist.

Not true. Look at the various Skype clients, e.g. for Linux. Memory usage ballooned after they wrote their Electron based client. It uses 4 to 5 times the amount of memory of the old Qt based client and idle CPU usage is through the roof, too. And it can't even handle long conversations smoothly.

Electron app versus using their website I guess. In which case I use their website.

But I agree, it's almost never a choice, but it's a hypothetical

All other things being equal of course not.

> All other things being equal

All other things will never be equal.

Absolutely equal no, or else it would be the same app. But that's contrived.

My point is that given two apps that both have the features a user considers "must have", few, if any, would pick the Electron one over the native, precisely because of the extra burden in cpu/memory/speed of Electron.

An electron-apps can use and call native code. I see Rust getting some attraction being bundled with electron apps. This should be a thing every electron app maker out there. Rust or otherwise.

You discounted an "all my friends voted for..." argument with a different "all my friends voted for..." statement.

Popular does not mean good. In fact, it often means the opposite.

Profitable?

Slack is probably the best example for a bad Electron application. So slow.

Totally agreed. I dare to download an Electron app these days. Some days I wish it was 1997 and all apps were native :)

Most end users don't know what Electron is.

They know what slow is though.