> if this trend continues soon we'll end up with electron based text editor, music player, terminal, 2 - 3 chat apps, git browser, etc. etc.
I can imagine at some point the runtime, being so popular, getting heavily optimized by some stakeholder. I already heard that there are some significant contributions from Microsoft. They had also did the same for node.js.
> and given the choice I'd rather go to zoo than buy more ram
While I generally agree with your comment, I personally like shopping for hardware much more than pitying caged animals.
That 500-700MB for an ordinary single application is already using heavily optimized electron. I do not think electron is some sloppily written piece of software. That monstrous ram consumption is just the effect of using browser framework for non-browser application. Nothing will change until people simply stop using electron.
You may be right, I don't know the internals of the Webkit. Then I suppose an alternative with an easy migration path would pop-up... or the supply of developers with good native experience would need to magically increase, which is very less likely to happen.
> or the supply of developers with good native experience would need to magically increase
Well one of the thing I notice despite all the new apps made with electron, none of them opened a category of new type of software which wasn't there before. It is just quickly made chat app, notes app, text editor and so on. So it is not that we need dramatically more native developers but to ask do we need 100 more apps of same type.
The only real benefit I see to Electron is it's finally delivering what Java promised, which is apps that run on all platforms from a single code base. Although, just like Java, they end up having non-platform-native UIs, and I imagine there's still some amount of platform-specific work you need to do (e.g. providing appropriate keyboard shortcuts on each platform).
Isn't this mostly true for Java already? I certainly recall downloading various applications bundled in .jar's and having them work fine on whatever platform I happened to be using.
I think people moved away from writing end-user apps in Java because they were bloated and slow and had ugly UIs, not because cross-platform development was super hard.
I can imagine at some point the runtime, being so popular, getting heavily optimized by some stakeholder. I already heard that there are some significant contributions from Microsoft. They had also did the same for node.js.
> and given the choice I'd rather go to zoo than buy more ram
While I generally agree with your comment, I personally like shopping for hardware much more than pitying caged animals.