It is absurd the people that show up out of the woodwork every Electron article to complain about performance. Meanwhile, I have not closed Discord for more than a day or two in years. A quick Ctrl-Shift-Esc shows that it is using 180MB of RAM right now with ~20 rooms open, as well as DMs. Meanwhile, Discord has fantastic uptimes and never impedes performance while competitive online games run alongside it. The idea of trying to replicate the interface in something like tkinter is cringeworthy at best.
Discord supports animated gifs, modals, videos, emojis, fonts, code samples, markdown, and game integrations right in the chat! Please, please try and replicate that with Tkinter, an API where you'd need to roll your own drag-and-drop.
If i want to run discord as a website, using the same resources as any other website, i CAN! Its the same codebase and interface. I run the full desktop client for the better filesystem, game, and chat integration and it is worth the measley RAM on my modern machine.
Discord is an intelligent start up that was able to pivot from a chat client to a games marketplace with a one-click update. Their use of the erlang VM shows that they make considered tech decisions based on tested technology. I think their use of electron, at least from this users perspective, was a great decision. I realize they are just one example of electron apps, and I'd have a harder time defending a file-unzipper or some madness using Electron, but it no doubt has its uses. To suggest otherwise would be premature optimization at best.
Discord is an intelligent start up that was able to pivot from a chat client to a games marketplace with a one-click update. Their use of the erlang VM shows that they make considered tech decisions based on tested technology. I think their use of electron, at least from this users perspective, was a great decision. I realize they are just one example of electron apps, and I'd have a harder time defending a file-unzipper or some madness using Electron, but it no doubt has its uses. To suggest otherwise would be premature optimization at best.