Should they have re-written Chromium too?
Projects with much smaller budget than Atrophic has achieved much better x-plat UI without relying on electron [1]. There are more sensible options like Qt and whatnot for rendering UIs.
You can even engineer your app to have a single core with all the business logic as a single shared library. Then write UI wrappers using SwiftUI, GTK, and whatever microsoft feels like putting out as current UI library (I think currently it's WinUI2) consuming the core to do the interesting bits.
Heck there are people whom built gui toolkits from scratch to support their own needs [2].
[1] - https://musescore.org/en [2] - https://www.gpui.rs
What really am I to conclude by the mere fact that they used electron? The AI was not so magical that it overcame sense?
Am I to imagine that the fact that they advertise AI coding means I therefore have a window into their development process and their design choices?
I just think the notion is much sillier than all of us seem to be treating it.
Maybe their dog food isn't as tasty as they want you to believe.
What are we to presume from the fact that they did not do that?
And therefore, what?
That’s what’s missing and I think we should just be clear on: it is a design choice to choose electron over writing a native app.
If it really is a design choice then it's a bad decision imo.
1. Anthropic had no problem spending tens of thouands of dollars of tokens re-writing the C compiler a couple weeks ago before abandonining it within hours of launch, despite promising that fixes were coming in the following days. 2. Regardless are you arguing that re-writing Chromium would have been a good solution for the original suggestion of native apps? Aren't there better existing approaches from companies that don't claim to have the best coders, nor are worth hundreds of millions, billions, tens of billions, nor hundreds of billions of dollars, so I'm unsure why you made that specific suggestion? Wouldn't pointing to an existing product's native approach be a better suggestion?
What really is the argument and the threshold we’re proposing here?
I just think the idea that we have some sort of vision into their design process because we can look at some externally visible feature of the design is silly. Am I supposed to presume the same thing about capabilities for every shop that creates an electron app? Am I supposed to take anyone’s native app and see that as a claim that they’ve cracked coding?
These things are just orthogonal to the questions at hand. They’re just simply not related and everyone here seems to pretend like they are.
We can all talk about how this or that app should be different, but the idea is "electron sux => ????? "
Why should I care that they didn't rebuild the desktop app I don't use. Their TUI is really nice.
