Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?

• tauri

  469 77,154 9.8 Rust

  Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

  

Tauri is certainly not dead, and with a security audit in progress and a stable release in its fourth RC, it's surely very close to 'production ready'.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/releases/tag/tauri-v1.0....

• react-nodegui

  8 6,167 3.4 TypeScript

  Build performant, native and cross-platform desktop applications with native React + powerful CSS like styling.🚀

  

I have to use Discord and Element on a regular basis (which both use Electron). They both use an unreasonable amount of RAM, and I feel this even more as my laptop is quite old and has 4GB of RAM.

I keep looking for alternatives to Electron, which wouldn't require such heavy resources to run, but my searches always seem to come up short. There are a number of solutions that are either dead or are not ready for production yet, such as React NodeGUI[0], Proton Native[1] or react-native-desktop-qt[2].

There's react-native-windows, but I'm not running Windows, and even if that did gain Linux compatibility it seems that they're quite focused on Microsoft-owned platforms.

Is "just stick Chromium into all your apps" seriously the best we can do as an industry? It's resource-inefficient to high heaven, not to mention that it's slow and doesn't integrate with the native platform styles at all. As a JavaScript developer, I'm quite surprised this is the best there is for cross-platform JavaScript development.

[0]: https://github.com/nodegui/react-nodegui

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• react-native-desktop-qt

  1 1,201 0.0 JavaScript

  A Desktop port of React Native, driven by Qt, forked from Canonical

  

[2]: https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop-qt

• quickjs

  65 7,609 9.2 C

  Public repository of the QuickJS Javascript Engine.

• sciter-js-sdk

  43 1,632 9.3 Pawn

  Discontinued Sciter.JS - Sciter but with QuickJS on board instead of my TIScript

• Godello

  17 744 2.1 GDScript

  Trello inspired kanban board made with the Godot Engine and GDScript, with a real-time collaborative backend (Elixir and Phoenix Channels) and a local backend for offline usage (Godot Custom Resources)

A quick search gives me Godello: https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello

• proposals

  19 196 0.0

  A home for well-formed proposed incubations for the web platform. All proposals welcome. (by WICG)

  

> This means that software development is a failing discipline. All we can do is to come up with ever more ridiculous layers of complexity on top of mindboggling complexity, recursively. All of this is totally self-inflicted. The problem domains that our software needs to deal with are complex enough. But we keep piling on shit of our own making.

Awwhhh why so glum? This sounds so alarmist, so fraught & bleak!

I don't see anyone as having a bead yet on what the final destination is, on what is right or perfect. I see change & innovation & exploration as necessary, ongoing, and this layering of platforms atop each other is part of that larger bigger quest for us all to learn what serves ourselves well, to figure out how we align.

Overall these Adapter layers are quite performant, quite fast, and they isolate rather than leak complexity quite effectively. Electron's doesn't have to invent a ton of stuff to create this pleasant, familiar environment for developers or users- the operating system is simply not that relevant, is easily adapted, by a pretty boring regular programming language (Node.JS) and the world's most popular multimedia page/resource system (the browser).

Right now, yes, we have the web platform as a layer above native in many cases, but I'm not sure that that is so alarming. Maybe it's transitional? The early smartphones were both enormously web first, decided to use something great rather than reinvent: the Palm Pre and original iPhone (which was webapps only). In modern times, there's ChromeOS, and Palm's webOS continues under new stewartship, mainly on TVs. If the complaint is layers of complexity, maybe we just need to get rid of proprietary & legacy platforms, & embrace the common, shared medium that all computing has. Or find new unifying better platforms!

In general, I see these new platforms as being extremely liberating, as helping reduce the complexity developers have to mess with, by offering a set of well-defined standards & well known constraints & behaviors. Rather than a complicated, particular OS tied to some specific devices, with it's own quirks, with ever evolving platform capabilities & changing toolchain

> If this is what software development has become, then there's no way it won't end in total and utter disaster when people start to recognize the already all too common piss poor products that barely manage to do the absolute minimum and rebel against them. It may not be marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation who'll be lined up against the wall first, but software developers when the revolution comes.

Again I think moderation is good council here, but I also agree in principle that there is some awareness software can be a bit of a disaster, and it's visible that sometimes updates & "improvements" serve external interests not the users.

Where I differ is I see Electron as a fairly hopeful, possible open future for computing, that does embrace users, more so than most software. Most software is not malleable, not adaptable. Electron, on the other hand, offers the very slick, open ended DevTools Protocol for most every app, which allows users control & automation & expansion of software. We can write some userscript & change the behavior of webplatform & electron systems, which is hugely powerful, is a far fairer shake & far more liberty than most computing platforms, where apps are usually compiled down, fixed in form & nature.

This second paragraph really brings me back to where we started: I don't think we have a bead yet, as a larger world. It feels like there's so much discovery, so much understanding to develop. What makes me hopeful is groups like https://wicg.io , which try to understand & consider how we might do better, which work to build open standards for the internet, for our shared multimedia platform, as a community, securely. There's so much further for all computing to go, so much we need to do to better serve users. I don't see anyone has having a strong lock on that, it feels like there's more to learn & become than there is that we've locked down, by far, so I am hopeful & excited & happy to see us staying malleable, working to unblock innovation at all levels, in all computing. Electron is a great & positive force here, albiet I look forward to other projects listed in the comments such as Tau providing similar-ideas with slightly-different execution.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• vodon-pro

  17 78 3.7 TypeScript

  Vodon Pro is a video player designed for esports coaches to review footage of players.

I'd be interested in learning a bit more about how you've integrated Tauri with video playback. I have a synchronised video player tool[1] that I've built in Electron for the e-sports community. When I was investigating technology to use to build it, I was really set on using GStreamer as I could share a clock between all of the videos to ensure the synchronisation was perfectly accurate.

Electron hasn't been too bad, I've been able to construct a quick prototype which will prove if people are interested in what it does. I'd ultimately like to build a native app though.

[1] https://github.com/Rodeoclash/vodon-pro

• graderjs

  10 155 0.0 Shell

  💦 Turn your full-stack NodeJS application into a downloadable cross-platform binary. Also works for SPAs, or regular web-sites.

  

I'm working on an alternative. It's a slightly different take, but provides similar functionality of Node.js plus front end code in a packaged binary. Instead of using a weird custom fork of chrome and downloading that for every different binary we just use the system Chrome browser (or install it once for all apps). Eventually we can probably expand to use other Chrome browsers or even other web driver supported browsers which Firefox seems to be building that support out. I just like the idea of using something that's already on the system.

Take a look at the wonderful GraderJS, heh :)

https://github.com/crisdosyago/graderjs

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