Electron is {derogatory_phrase_here}!!!111

Do I have your attention?

If you are like me then you are getting sick and tired of these kinds of posts. Every few years, sites like HackerNews and Lobsters seem to find a new dead horse to beat. I’ll never forget seeing “Rails is an anti-pattern” or “Stop using jQuery” posts numerous times every week. It sucked then and it sucks now.

Remember the days of most apps being either Windows-only or Mac-only? Have you noticed that becoming less and less the case (think Atom, Visual Studio Code and Hyper)? Frameworks like Electron have something to do with this trend. As an application developer who primarily works with macOS and Linux, you can be pretty certain that I’m not going to take the time to learn .NET to ship a version of my app that I rarely use. Sorry but that’s just the way the world works. My time is limited and valuable.

I don’t mean to sound negative or aggressive. I am just sick and tired of overly opinionated people in tech who seem to spend all day complaining about software without offering reasonable alternatives or trying to understand why things are this way. Sure, Chromium is a memory hog and a lot of developers don’t properly profile their JavaScript code. Write blog posts about how to improve these processes instead of disparaging an entire ecosystem.

Make a branch of Electron and try to make it work with parts of Servo. Look at configuration or compile-time flags that can be used to optimize Chromium. Research and write about tools to help build more performant JavaScript code. Rewrite it all in BrainFuck. I don’t care.

Some decisions aren’t optimal but they are rarely made for the reasons you invent. If you think Electron is so bad, take some time and talk to developers who use it every day and try to understand their point of view. Ignore the garbage soundbites and press releases praising the tech.

Put your [money|time] where your mouth is!