> And is there any wonder Electron has such a terrible reputation?
Certainly not, but you can't fix it by putting less RAM in the machines of people with budget constraints. The developers will just pay for more themselves and then not care about those people because people who can't afford RAM generally aren't lucrative customers.
And it's also worth considering what actually causes this.
Developers want their code to work on every platform. They don't want to write different code for each platform. But each platform wants them to have to, because that makes it more likely there will be software that only works on their platform, or that doesn't work on some new competing platform. So they refuse to develop or implement cross-platform standards.
Then someone else has to do it, but that's rather a lot of work, and it turns out the easiest way to do it is to piggyback on the work already done for browsers to make them work on every platform. That's Electron. It's terribly inefficient but it saves the developer a lot of porting work, so it's widely used.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
It’s not in Apple’s interest to do that. It would cost a lot of money to develop and only benefit the competition. It would also slow down Apple’s own ability to innovate on the APIs until the competitors catch up.
Or are you saying Apple should develop the APIs for Windows and Linux as well? Why would they do that?
Certainly not, but you can't fix it by putting less RAM in the machines of people with budget constraints. The developers will just pay for more themselves and then not care about those people because people who can't afford RAM generally aren't lucrative customers.
And it's also worth considering what actually causes this.
Developers want their code to work on every platform. They don't want to write different code for each platform. But each platform wants them to have to, because that makes it more likely there will be software that only works on their platform, or that doesn't work on some new competing platform. So they refuse to develop or implement cross-platform standards.
Then someone else has to do it, but that's rather a lot of work, and it turns out the easiest way to do it is to piggyback on the work already done for browsers to make them work on every platform. That's Electron. It's terribly inefficient but it saves the developer a lot of porting work, so it's widely used.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.