it works well, but it's a fundamentally flawed way to produce cross-platform applications. too much performance is just wasted in the DOM and the JS runtime.
developers trade a small amount of development time profit for themselves in exchange for perpetually sluggish software for each and every one of their users, who could number in the millions. it is a few weeks or months gained for the development team, but costs years and years of cpu time measured cumulatively across all users.
the tradeoff should be the other way around. I will gladly trade away weeks of my time if it saves cumulative years of my users' time.
End user CPU time hasn't been a bottleneck in over a decade. There is fairly little difference in processing power requirements for home users now from roughly when Core2Quad CPUs were out. I was still running one of those as a development workstation until about 5 years ago.
CPU cycles are absurdly cheap. CPU speeds have been stagnant for 15 years. Average consumer applications still aren't taking great advantage of threading and with the recent CPU architecture attacks we're better off without Hyperthreading anyway.
The absurd popularity of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, Figma, Signal and WhatsApp with consumers says clearly that nobody minds all that much.
it's not a bottleneck, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. how many chunks of coal burned solely to give Electron the Watts required to do what it is doing over something more reasonable? it is definitely more than zero.
how many laptop charge cycles are caused entirely by electron apps using more power than traditional applications? impossible to know for sure, but easy to know that it is far greater than zero.
does this mean that you can carry my preference to its extreme and assume that I am advocating that all applications be written in Assembly and be extensively tuned? no, it does not.
I am saying that Electron is a tool of a developer who cares about their own experience over the experience of all of the users of the software they write, combined. the entire reason we write software is so that an end user's life can be made easier. if you think anything different, you likely have an MBA or don't understand why people pay for or use software. Even games are played so that the life of the player can be enriched. Part of the work ethic of this field (that apparently only I believe in) is to not deliver terrible software to end users, and it is my personal opinion that Electron developers choose what is easiest for them to get another round of funding going, and not what is best for the users who actually consume the product. These developers write for money, and to make the world a better place for themselves, at the small, but very real, expense of everyone else.
the absurd popularity of the electron apps you mention is probably due to the fact that they are only available as Electron apps or as web pages. "Look how successful electron is" doesn't count if there is not an equivalent traditional app to compare it against. And I am recalling a lot of people on the internet, including this website, and lots of people at work actively and repeatedly complaining about the performance of all of those applications, so I am not really sure that you are standing on solid ground at all.
it works well, but it's a fundamentally flawed way to produce cross-platform applications. too much performance is just wasted in the DOM and the JS runtime.
developers trade a small amount of development time profit for themselves in exchange for perpetually sluggish software for each and every one of their users, who could number in the millions. it is a few weeks or months gained for the development team, but costs years and years of cpu time measured cumulatively across all users.
the tradeoff should be the other way around. I will gladly trade away weeks of my time if it saves cumulative years of my users' time.