Inspired by: https://twitter.com/Rimmy_Downunder/status/1686188323164028928
Transcription:
A stick figure pondering: "Hm. If only there was a platform for my desktop application"
The stick figure stepping over many native GUIs to pick up Google Chromium.
The stick figure: "Ah! Here we go!"
Discord moment
“Hmm, we need to make a communications app. Communicating is important, it’ll keep millions of people in contact with eachother. We’ll have to make it as lightweight as possible.”
“OH! I KNOW! ELECTRON!!”
don't blame electron for how bad discord performs, just open it up in your browser and watch as the discord tab uses 1gb of ram after 5 minutes of usage. discord simply doesn't care about performance or resource usage
One of Discord's targets is web, and I don't think there is another good UI toolkit that could maintain that target with easy feature parity. Some UI toolkits like Godot (which is a game engine) are capable of targeting web using a canvas element, but that's probably not going to be as performant or as native feeling as a standard website. They could also use a separate code base, but then there would be large feature parity issues. They could also drop the web target, but that might make it harder for users who don't have permission to install software or use Chrome OS.
I feel like Discord is one of the examples where Electron makes sense. If only they allowed third party apps so desktop users who don't care about having every feature can have a better experience.
True and fair. Definitely agree with your third-party app thing (man, where have I seen the benefits of having third party apps before?)
I do remember trying out a (TOS breaking) third party app I found on GitHub, but it lacked a lot of features like voice calls and whatnot and crashed frequently. That’s to be expected, though.
You may be interested in the Discord Client Encylcopedia