Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?

119 points

4 years ago

I have to use Discord and Element on a regular basis (which both use Electron). They both use an unreasonable amount of RAM, and I feel this even more as my laptop is quite old and has 4GB of RAM.

I keep looking for alternatives to Electron, which wouldn't require such heavy resources to run, but my searches always seem to come up short. There are a number of solutions that are either dead or are not ready for production yet, such as React NodeGUI[0], Proton Native[1] or react-native-desktop-qt[2].

There's react-native-windows, but I'm not running Windows, and even if that did gain Linux compatibility it seems that they're quite focused on Microsoft-owned platforms.

Is "just stick Chromium into all your apps" seriously the best we can do as an industry? It's resource-inefficient to high heaven, not to mention that it's slow and doesn't integrate with the native platform styles at all. As a JavaScript developer, I'm quite surprised this is the best there is for cross-platform JavaScript development.

[0]: https://github.com/nodegui/react-nodegui [1]: https://proton-native.js.org/ [2]: https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop-qt

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