Item — HN Reader

> We don't even write utilities in JVM languages, because spawning whole JVM is generally considered too expensive.

This is definitely not why, at least today. People are even willing to spawn an entirely new userspace (docker) for their utilities.

> Yet there are people who will happily spawn whole web browser and even go as far as recommend doing so.

Electron, like the JVM is nice and cross-platform with no BS. The only problem with the JVM is that it doesn't have a lot of important features/historical advantage that web tech does, not to mention the difference in quality between web UI and Swing, JavaFX, etc,. The combination of all of this is pretty much why electron is preferred. And I guess I should say chrome-tech instead of web-tech.

> All because they can't even write a left-pad function

Well, they certainly want the functions they write to work on every possible combination of OS/userspace.

> Electron, like the JVM is nice and cross-platform with no BS.

If we were talking in person I'd look at you like you had 2 heads now. In my bubble it is extremely en vogue to hate on Electron being a piece of bloated shit…

…but then again, I will agree that this is a piece of social signaling and would need some actual evaluation. There's probably some real problems with Electron that have caused people to start hating on it, but who knows how relevant those are. Trivial junk can easily snowball into social signals like this.

Oh it has its problems for sure. Especially the bloat.

I was just bringing up the similarity in ease of packaging.