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The weirdness that is Electron

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Tuxman:
I never could see the point in the Atom editor.

Using a bloated web browser runtime as the code base for a text editor which never could do notably more than Emacs or a sanely configured Sublime Text never seemed to be something well-thought, not even considering the cross-platform approach. Writing cross-platform applications never required a virtual machine. Additionally there's quite a lot of overhead. A "Hello, world" GUI application in Ceramic, the Common Lisp port of Electron, takes about 256 MiB of hard disk space. This must be the future(*).

However, Electron seems to gain attraction. Today I found an Electron-based terminal emulator - nice look, weird feeling -, and it suffers from the same problems. I guess we'll all soon grow tired of those "oooh, I look like TextMate!" applications altogether, but until then, I wonder what we normal programmers can do to help prevent the world to consider seriously bloated runtime environments a must-have.

* I admit one of my in-development applications uses Ceramic. Know your enemy!

IainB:
...I guess we'll all soon grow tired of those "oooh, I look like TextMate!" applications altogether, but until then, I wonder what we normal programmers can do to help prevent the world to consider seriously bloated runtime environments a must-have. ...
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-Tuxman (September 05, 2015, 07:38 PM)
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Well, they say that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", or something, but probably those fat, bloated look-alike pieces of software are at best only academic experiments to discover the answer to questions such as, for example (say), "What happens if we try to do this or emulate that using Language X?"
The crunch test is likely to come when you try to emulate something that is seriously compute-intensive and high volume (e.g., transaction processing), whereupon the inherent inefficiencies of bloated software will tend to stand out like a sore thumb. So, you consider maybe keeping those in assembler...

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