Electron has been a game-changer for our lab as a rapid prototyping platform.
A few thoughts...
A few thoughts...
1/ The developer experience is top-notch. Our team has built prototypes on Windows/C#, iOS/Swift, Android/Kotlin, browser/JS/React, Chrome OS/Chrome Apps/Typescript, Flutter/Dart, and Rust/WASM, to name a few.
2/ Electron has consistently been the easiest to get started with, and then smooth and convenient for ongoing development. (We haven't had to deal with long-term maintainability, however)
3/ Compare it to numerous other attempts to unroll the web stack and package for desktop or mobile: Fluid, PWAs, React Native, Chrome Apps. We worked extensively with Chrome Apps on Chrome OS expecting something Electron-like. Instead it was miserable.
4/ Electron OS integration and hooks such as filesystem, network, drag-and-drop, copy-paste, system tray, and release packaging are solid. Not perfect, but damn good given the wide gap between native development and web technologies.
5/ Access to the whole world of NPM modules is a big deal. In that way a superior Javascript experience compared even to in-browser apps.
6/ Electron gets heavy criticism for unreasonable memory use and long startup times. Certainly justified. Happens that for our team's needs (prototypes with development lifespan of ~2 months) this is not a big pain point.
7/ Overall Electron feels like a sleeper hit that could go much further with more focused investment. Would love to see Github spin it out as a foundation ala Mozilla, or potentially even as a commercial entity.
8/ But anyhow, big thanks to the Electron team for all they've done so far. Excited to see what the future holds.
