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A comment on I've spent the last two years building a new email client. Parent comment

Re:I've spent the last two years building a new email client by laumars on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @05:33PM (#16981344)
I would normally agree with you but I can actually see the point of Electron for email because you'd need a HTML renderer anyway to display emails (assuming you want the ability to view HTML emails, if not then you're better off with a console client and save yourself even more RAM :p)

Plus Gmail and a few others big names in webmail require a HTTP client for authentication if you want to use their proprietary sync (granted there's also POP3 and IMAP. But while IMAP is good in a number of ways it's still far from perfect).

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Re:I've spent the last two years building a new email client by luuio on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:21PM (#16988387)
What does rendering HTML or needing a HTTP client have to do with Electron?

As far as I know, every single usable language comes with a HTTP client, and every single GUI framework has a "WebView" control or equivalent.

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Re:I've spent the last two years building a new email client by laumars on Friday May 04, 2018 @04:12AM (#16992981)
WebView's are typically just WebKit / Blink / Trident / whatever embedded anyway. So if you're going to embed Blink then you've already lost any significant memory savings you'd hope to make by avoiding Electron in the first place. Thus you might as well write the whole thing in Blink / Electron from the outset as that will also give you massive developer productivity gains (which it will - such is the sad state of desktop application development these days).

As for the HTTP client point; you can use a simple HTTP API (libcurl or whatever) to perform the webmail authentication but honestly you're in for a whole world of pain because it's really more than just a HTTP call. Ideally you'd want another webview for that as well. Oh how all those individual webviews are going to add significantly to your memory usage. You might as well consolidate them all into one...let's call that new WebView "Electron" shall we ;)

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