Re:Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript
by jhall1468 on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @09:26AM
(#17302801)
These aren't Electron apps. They are applications written in Javascript and compiled to native via ReactXP and react-native-windows.
Maintainability is a problem regardless of language, scaling is moot as these run native code, scalability is an odd word choice given we are talking about desktop apps, and intrinsic conversion can be solved via TypeScript, Flow or any other typing framework. C, Java and C# all have their own set of downsides as well, but we don't pretend those aren't "real" languages.
You are correct that "it doesn't have to be this way" which is why native compilation exists and is continuing to grow.
Re:Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript
by scq on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @09:30AM
(#17302825)
I don't think JavaScript itself is the problem here. Electron is slow to load and uses a lot of memory because it's loading an entire multiprocess Chromium runtime with all of the Web platform implemented, optimized for speed and security rather than memory usage.
Microsoft are using React Native here (aside from the Win32 build), which is going to be a lot more lightweight because it relies on the native platform for the heavy lifting.
Every time someone waits for an Electron app to load, or watches it eat their ram? That gets added to the prejudice scale. Every overly-slow page load that eats mobile battery. The feeling that "it doesn't have to be this way" is very strong.