Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
Electron is the only decent solution for building a cross OS app in 2019. I challenge you to give me a stack that It&#x27;s fairly simple to maintain on multiple desktop platforms, build UIs, has plugins to support most of the feature we&#x27;re used today in a browser, etc. Don&#x27;t forget that javascript now runs on the server, having a single language for everything is amazing.<p>The browser just became the best ecosystem for build apps and the native development frameworks are years behind the browser. The default set of Widgets available will make you waste months building your own widgets versus downloading a js plugin and it&#x27;s done in 30 minutes.<p>Electron just gets things done, period.<p>There are examples of fast Electron apps like Realm Browser. You can also build the UI with Electron and Javascript while you do some IPC with smaller binaries written in C++, Go lang, C#, etc. to try to improve the performance of some operations. It is possible to write good and fast Electron apps.<p>Don&#x27;t forget that many js developers came from jQuery and other backgrounds and might not have the best ideas when it comes to build desktop apps and even understanding an OS architecture. I don&#x27;t mean to be mean with these developers, we need to acknowledge that these days lots of companies just want Javascript developers and any cost.<p>Another major benefit of Electron is that platforms like Linux do get some support which is really great.<p>Without electron, I could not use Linux to work on projects that use Slack for example.<p>Without electron, many developer tools wouldn&#x27;t exist at all and most likely they would be tied to windows and&#x2F;or mac. Linux would be the biggest looser for sure.<p>Don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to shit on Electron, I love fast apps but, sometimes, buying more RAM and a faster CPU just solves the damn problem. I&#x27;m not saying people should write slow apps but at the end of the day I&#x27;ve stuff to get done.<p>I would rather see a better collaboration to try to improve Electron because... we need it. Either this or the native development tools need to wake up to 2019.