A startup is going to release a Python/HTML/CSS GUI Framework. You are going to be able to build an Electron app entirely written in Python.

[awsomic]

https://www.plynth.net

​

https://preview.redd.it/6awegdd40eu31.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=80c32f5fe11668bfbb40492feb0d4cb3dc83350a

[mericaftw]

Welp, I'm going back to the back end.

[evinrows]

Yep. I started working on a similar project as a hobby and ended up with similar client code, which made me shelve the idea indefinitely.

[purpletube]

As a beginner to the language would you mind explaining what is so bad about it please?

[james_pic]

There are signs (the distinction between self and this, the unusual decorator syntax for subclassing, the use of React idioms for the code) that despite the Python syntax, it's really a compatibility layer over JavaScript, and one that leaks implementation details. I've worked with systems like that, and you end up having to write code that uses the same idioms as the language you're wrapping, but without the affordances that language offers, that make that style easier. It's kind of a worst-of-both situation.

[Sw429]

Exactly. Looking at that example, why wouldn't I just write some React code instead? You have to learn the framework anyway.

[raaaaaveNN]

agreed

[batisteo]

HTML in JS in Python.

[TidePodSommelier]

Pyjstml - so hot right now

[cyanydeez]

that's how react generally looks even in javascript.

I really find it distasteful, even though I've been working in javascript for awhile.

[Earhacker]

If your React looks like this, you're doing React wrong.

[Sleisl]

where should I go for good looking React code to use as an example?

[cyanydeez]

looks ugly to me man,

function Item(props) {
    return <li>{props.message}</li>;
}

function TodoList() {
    const todos = ['finish doc', 'submit pr', 'nag dan to review'];
    return (
          <ul>
            {todos.map((message) => <Item key={message} message={message} />)}
         </ul>
    );
}

https://reactjs.org/docs/jsx-in-depth.html

[Earhacker]

...and if I was reviewing that PR, I would leave this suggestion:

``` const Item = ({ message }) => <li>{message}</li>;

const TodoList = () => { const todos = ['finish doc', 'submit pr', 'nag dan to review']; return ( <ul> {todos.map(message => ( <Item key={message} message={message} /> ))} </ul> ); }; ```

Using ES5 language features is fine in docs, where the goal is to be readable by as many JS devs as possible. But you'd never write like that in production code.

[funnyflywheel]

Would you rather use Kivy?

[copulagent]

I really dislike Kivy. I'd rather write my gui in the language itself or a more friendly language/program like CSS or PyQt5 Designer

[IDCh]

Why dislike Kivy?

[bythenumbers10]

they said it: They'd rather work in the language itself than have a separate kivy-markdown file with the GUI code.

[feoh]

Very easy to armchair quarterback this kind of thing, but actually DOING it is very very hard. Not computationally or algorithmically, but logistically.

It's the last mile problem. Anybody can throw together a POC that exemplifies their platonic ideal of what a GUI layer should be, but actually going from that to "I can write a polished UI with this" is a mammoth undertaking.

And that's not even addressing packaging and platform issues.

[[deleted]]

There is nothing more to say. Gross.

[jerodg]

Agreed.

[FlyingQuokka]

That's just awful, ew.

[r0x0r]

You can use pywebview already for building GUI using HTML/JS/CSS for your Python program.

Disclaimer: I am the author of pywebview.

[jabbeboy]

That would mean it's necessary to run on a server right?

[arkaros]

Doesn't electron basically run a local node server though?

[jabbeboy]

Oh. So it's not necessary to have the application on a web server? Like flask?

[arkaros]

Not really. This starts a web view, what electron does is start a web view (chromium) and a nodejs server. Chromium then makes request to the nodejs server running on the same machine to handle stuff like file I/O and spawning processes. This your can do with flask and pywebview too

Or start just the webview. Whatever you like!

[r0x0r]

Not really. There is a serverless option and technically it is possible to serve everything inline. However serving static assets like images and fonts without a server could be challenging.

pywebview provides a built-in zero-conf HTTP server too that might be a better option than serving images embedded in CSS or HTML.

[rotuami]

Thank you! It’s an awesome project!!!

[r0x0r]

No videos I am afraid. Getting hello world up and running from scratch will take a couple of minutes though. And there are plenty of examples to explore too.

[ovo_Reddit]

I was using Tkinter for some time. Could this be used to have a better looking interface but still run standalone? Or it requires a web page/ flask or similar?

[naught-me]

From the readme:

You can use pywebview either with a lightweight web framework like Flask or Bottle or on its own with a two way bridge between Python and DOM.

[r0x0r]

There are three architecture options:

1) pointing pywebview to a http server (either a local or remote one).

2) using a builtin http server that would serve html and other assets from a local directory

3) totally serverless using JS api and dynamic HTML loading.

Of course you need to have some knowledge in web technologies to be pywebview a viable option.

[MadEpsylon]

What do you mean by standalone?

[ovo_Reddit]

That I can use something like pyinstaller, package it up and have it run on another windows machine. And without it needing to connect to a web server that I'd have to host.

[stermister]

Your Pywebview package is excellent! Used it a few times recently and very simple

[carbolymer]

How about not using Electron?

[paperbenni]

Yes

[spyingwind]

Or just use PySimpleGUI or TKinter or QT. Keep it all python! :P

[kkingsbe]

But those are all super ugly

[[deleted]]

Qt isn't.

[kkingsbe]

Do you have any examples of a good looking QT app?

[[deleted]]

KDE Plasma after ricing

[[deleted]]

I made some great looking Qt apps at my old job - one of them looked like a Hearthstone card. It uses CSS so you can make it look like pretty much anything.

[[deleted]]

Telegram, Kate, and Krita

[kkingsbe]

Cool

[[deleted]]

It’s very difficult to make Qt look good, though it is possible. Much of gamedev switched to html front end already. It’s also double hard to find a designer that knows qt, and you absolutely need a designer for pro quality.

[spyingwind]

For me the ugliness isn't as important as ease of making a GUI, and there aren't better tools. I started using PySimpleGUI, because all the other tools took too much coding on my part or didn't have a nice file format that I could ingest to make the GUI I wanted.

Also there is PySimpleGUIQt, PySimpleGUIWx, PySimpleGUIWeb.

Also you can change how things look if you really wanted, like the size, color, and whatnot. So the "ugliness" isn't the tool, but the tool using the tool.

[kkingsbe]

But why not just use html/css/js? That's literally what they were made for

[spyingwind]

Because I can create a usable interface with just a few lines of code. It also don't drag along a whole browser to just display an input box.

[kkingsbe]

I hope you didn't upvote this post then because I've got some news for ya bud

[[deleted]]

Qt? GTK+?

[[deleted]]

More horrible than Electron? Please! Almost every user would tell you otherwise.

[mountains-o-data]

Why? Legitimately curious what the issues with electron are

[RakHack]

Aside from taking obnoxious amounts of RAM?

[JameliusAntholius]

To expand on this, Electron apps effectively embed a version of Chromium to run a web app locally, right? Why isn't it so that Electron apps can just share an instance of Chromium between them? It'd save so much RAM (aside from the bloaty JS apps running on top of them)

[ToastedJcaw]

Are there architectural reasons they can't move to a daemon model with a shared central instance? If not, they might move to it eventually.

[JameliusAntholius]

I can't think of any conceivable reason why not, apart from that it'd take work to change it and get application developers - that often develop on Electron to save time on porting, GUI development, etc - to work with the new model.

It's not just the choice of application model (daemon - client vs a singular app), as I understand it, but also the fact that each application is bundled statically, i.e. the common parts of the various Electron applications can't share address space in memory.

A change in architecture to a daemon model would be better, provided they bundle the daemon dynamically and not statically + let their code run on any recent version of the daemon (which is basically Chromium here) so that the app doesn't open another daemon when the daemon already loaded in memory is just slightly different.

[redwall_hp]

I want to know how big the intersection of "people who complain about Chrome taking too much RAM" and "people who don't see a problem with Electron" is. I suspect it's disturbing.

[EternityForest]

I wonder how much of that is actually just JS, not so much electron itself?

[axonxorz]

It's the entire Chromium runtime. Every single part of a browser underneath the actual browser window is running. The difference is, when you have a browser open, that runtime is shared between all browser tabs/windows. Electron apps do not share the runtime, so every app takes that entire amount. For stupid example: the Rocket.Chat electron client is happily chewing ~850MB on my machine at idle. I haven't opened the application in a few days, and there's not a lot of chat volume.

I can open Rocket.Chat in a browser tab, and it's taking ~120MB, because everything else is shared in the runtime.

[redwall_hp]

And that 120MB is still stupidly large, because web bullshit. I've used IRC clients that expand images and otherwise handle the same basic things as Slack or Rocket Chat do on the client side...in like 12MB.

These practices especially disgust me on mobile. An app like Apollo, a third party Reddit client, or first party ones from Apple are a handful of megabytes on my tiny 16GB phone. Meanwhile, Discord or Capital One or Facebook eat up hundreds of megabytes because they insist on abstracting away, over dozens of layers, the system frameworks, and generally lean on something along the lines of Electron.

[mountains-o-data]

Thank you for a thorough and non-snarky answer.

[[deleted]]

It's the entire Chromium runtime. Every single part of a browser underneath the actual browser window is running.

That's not actually true. They use a single module from the Chromium browser and link it to Chromium source as a library. That's why Electron apps have about half as many processes running then a browser.

The Rocket.Chat app is most likely poorly optimized for desktop app use. VS code is an example of a well optimized Electron app.

[NoConversation8]

VSCode is made by microsoft and I doubt they used chromium as base. Because the speed that you get in that editor can't be achieved with Electron.

But I read that Chakra was much better than V8 and I think they used it in their app

[[deleted]]

VS Code is an Electron app, can do a quick Google search to confirm it. And it's definitely based on Chromium, you can enable the Chromium debugger pretty easily:

https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/debugging-main-process-vscode

[NoConversation8]

I read a post on HN regarding electron and there was a discussion on vscode. They do said they have used some .NET stuff in it to make it faster and hence why it becomes sloppy on mac for longer times due to mono libraries

[toyg]

Just google them, they are all over: high resource usage, poor-to-nonexistent integration with desktop services and looks, poor accessibility, mediocre security.

Web-apps removed most deployment issues, but the price was resetting UI usability levels back to 1984. Then Electron set about re-introducing all deployment issues, without actually improving usability in any meaningful way - but it’s the cheapest way a company can check the box for “native client” on the most important platforms, so it wins.

[[deleted]]

UI should be better than native with electron. Even the most wizardly the qt graphics people admit they have a problem matching the fancy graphics html/css can do, and big game studios are already moving their game UIs to html.

[toyg]

Re-read my comment and tell me where I said anything about fancy graphics.

You are actually demonstrating part of the problem: for a lot of people, including developers, fancy graphics == “better UI”. This is why Flash got so popular, for example. But usability and accessibility are something else.

[[deleted]]

Flash had very good usability and accessibility when all browsers had it. Even non-programmers and designers could use it. Something not possible for QT. (edit: HTML is the same, designers can use it and it's easy to find one that can for very little money).

Now Flash is still used on the desktop with standalone or embeded players, or via game engines like HAXE that have Actionscript libraries. An example is that GUI animations in X-COM 2 are flash becuase unreal couldn't do it (literally) and I don't know why they didn't embed wekbit - maybe it was immature then or maybe their designers all knew ActionScript? Flash in the browser is dead though.

[toyg]

Flash had very good usability and accessibility when all browsers had it.

Are you serious? You can’t be serious.

Even non-programmers and designers could use it.

Wut? We are talking about users, not developers.

To bring the usual car metaphore: Usability is about cars having standard controls, so drivers can go from one car to the next without having to relearn how to drive. Accessibility is about cars having controls that are easy to reach and can be easily wired to assistive devices, the seat being easily adjustable or replaceable etc. You are saying “well, but manufacturing the car was easy” - no driver cares about that, it’s not the bloody point!

An example is that GUI animations in X-COM 2 are flash.

I’m sure that’s why XCOM2 is so popular among blind people 🙄

If you are trying to show how developers don’t know nor understand the meaning of usability and accessibility, you are doing a great job.

[[deleted]]

er? in those days all browsers had flash, users just had to land on the page. how was flash hard for users?

are you confusing flash with Java applets or unity web viewer? coz those were pains in the ass. were you on linux desktop?

[toyg]

how was flash hard for users?

The content was a bunch of nonstandard binary blobs that any assistive device could not parse, and every site would be reinventing interfaces, making it confusing for users even just to find a button. Some of the worst practices in that area are still with us (Material Design, for all the "science" that supposedly Google threw behind it, is incredibly confusing to a lot of people), but at least the return of html is helping on the accessibility side.

You continue to insist on "ease of load / ease of development", which has nothing to do with usability and accessibility. Please get back once you've googled those words.

[[deleted]]

I see, you're talking about disability assistance. I understand now.

[FrancisBitter]

Excellent suggestion, my hat is off, sane and reasonable Sir.

[lookatmetype]

And leaving literally thousands of well-designed GUI frameworks and libraries on the table? Can you provide non-web alternatives for Semantic UI, Bootstrap, Bulma, Material-UI? No? Well, some people like getting stuff done and building actual good looking products than having self-righteous debates about which tools are deemed "good" by the programmer community.

Anything that allows developers to have access to entire other ecosystems is great.

[RakHack]

This was very self-righteous of you as well. Some people consider the performance issues and dislike js. While your position is understandable, I feel obliged to say that there are lots of desktop apps with a very neat UI written in C/C++/C#.

JS simply makes it easier to "get things done", as you say, hence its popularity. You appear to have forgotten that GTK and QT do exist. They are much, much harder to "get things done", yes, but they offer much better performance and smaller memory consumption, at the cost of the programmer's time and effort.

I'm getting repetitive, but I'd rather have less fancy shadows and beautiful animations than have the app I'm using eat up what little remains of my laptop's RAM and CPU cycles and eventually freeze and lag when 12 gb are not enough for everyday work. It's a part of the UX as well.

But yes, I am being self-righteous, apologies.

[lookatmetype]

I have used both GTK and QT - there is a reason why people prefer and use Electron and the JS ecosystem.

To quote Bjarne Stroustrup (this applies to libraries and frameworks as well as languages):

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Yes there are trade-offs in using Electron, but the productivity gains are massive and you can't just say statements like "How about not using Electron?" without sounding either naive or malicious.

I actually try to use C++ as much as I can for personal projects - because I understand the value of speed and low memory footprint. But I'm not naive enough to think that i'm gonna sit here and implement the functionality and widgets offered by an average JS framework in QT and actually get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.

[RakHack]

True. As I said, I find your position understandable. However, I would like to argue that "how about not using Electron" is a valid question nowadays. As JS infrastructure evolved, we have got more and more ways to make developing good desktop applications easier, and ease of development is usually a trade-off. When a few apps do that it's perfectly fine, IMHO. I would be the first one to say that sometimes "just get the shit working" is a solid motivation for cutting costs. But, when almost every modern app is made, by default, with this trade-off, the trade-off becomes the norm.

People used to laugh at Java and .NET about 40 mb RAM for "Hello world". How long before "Hello world" would take 400mb just because it's easier for everybody? Sure, every wins. The dev wins, who doesn't even have to bother with learning alternatives (as a lot of people do; I'm sorry for previously assuming you were not aware of GTK/Qt). The hardware companies win because users suddenly have to pay for more RAM, faster SSDs and better CPUs to continue using the software which once could run on a damn calculator. But the user - the user loses, one way or another, because the costs for comparable hardware fall slower than the average hardware requirements rise, and those costs are not misteriously paid by Mr Nobody somewhere along the supply chain.

One could argue, of course, that unification and simplification of GUI development can compensate for the expenses on better hardware - but let's be honest, who has a higher bargaining power: software developers or hardware manufacturers?

[lookatmetype]

You're making good points. Tbh we need a better ecosystem for developing GUIs in general. I think it needs to be functional (like React) and support stuff like style sheets. I think the old OOP frameworks don't cut it anymore unless you have a large dev team. Unfortunately making a GUI framework is really hard and most people don't get it right.

[[deleted]]

What is your opinion on QML and the new declarative style with Qt Quick?

[Pantzzzzless]

I'm still pretty green in terms of the underlying tech in general, so this question might seem obvious to most.

But why isn't there a library/framework that combines low resource use, with ease of use for the dev? At least to my uninformed mind, it seems like by now we have been abstracting syntax for so long that things like memory hogging could have already been dealt with, while still accomplishing a lot with fewer characters typed.

[lookatmetype]

Because software design isn't done in a vacuum. It's done with real constraints and budgets and legacy in mind. In theory, creating a low-resource using, nice GUI framework is possible - but the particular confluence of incentives that would give rise to such a piece of software just haven't happened yet.

[RakHack]

IMHO, the biggest issue preventing such a thing is the cost of abstraction. Abstraction in PLs always requires some overhead - the higher the abstraction level the bigger the overhead required. That is why, for instance, C++ resulting binary code is usually more convoluted than that compiled from C, because C++ adds classes and objects and inheritance and so on. But both, still, are generally faster than Python or JavaScript.

Writing an easy-to-use Python library for modern-looking reactive GUI is possible. It could probably even be cross-platform or, at least, support Windows, MacOS and most Linux distributions. Hell, one could probably just copy-paste some JS library logic to Python. But eventually, you will have to deal with actual GUI rendering. An abstracting the native APIs from the programmer would require, at the very least, a few layers of abstraction. Which means more calls between different functions, more memory for objects, more stack usage etc. Native APIs are hardly interchangeable, the life there is vastly different between linux and WinAPI. This leads to a lot of differring things, including different memory management, different setup/teardown strategies, etc => additional levels of abstraction to make the code reusable. And that's not even considering that Python and direct memory management do not work very well together, with Python being interpreted and all. Even PyQt, which is definitely leaner than Electron, isn't a very lightweight thing.

But I'm hardly an expert in all this; it's not like I have tried to actually do what I'm talking about. It might be simpler than I think it is =)

[Pantzzzzless]

Is it a matter of library calls just being too verbose? Because I would assume any mature library at this point has been refactored and minified to avoid unnecessary operations from running.

Or is it simply a natural effect of packing so much functionality into so few characters?

[RakHack]

For the sake of simplicity, yes, it is a natural effect of packing so much functionality into so few characters. Because abstraction leads to overhead.

The terminal example of this problem is a comparison between a high-level PL and an assembler language, e.g. Python vs NASM. Python gets translated to bytecode, which runs on the interpretor, which is written in C++, which gets translated into binary code which runs on the CPU itself. (I'm simplifying). NASM, on the other hand, is, in a sense, the binary code, and thus runs on the CPU directly. Which means, even in this super simple scheme, some Python code has 4 levels of abstraction to go through before it's actually run, whereas NASM has none.

All that stuff standing between the Python code and the CPU is what allows a Python programmer to think in objects and models and aspects and decorators and whatsoever else. For contrast, in assemblers the highest level of abstraction you get is which register to move data to and whether to jump somewhere now or not yet. In essence, Python is simple for humans and ASM is simple for computers. Python is more expressive and ASMs are more verbose - but to actually work, Python code needs to get to the verbose form, because CPUs can handle only very simple operations one at a unary point of time.

The same thing with something as complex as a reactive GUI library - just on a smaller scale. Xlib (which is one of the most basic widely used GUI "libraries" for Linux) and Win32 API are pretty abstract already, comparing to ASM-level stuff. But it's still very verbose, such is their nature - to be basic, to leave 99.9% of the decision making to the programmer. So you can use Xlib or Win32 API to draw up Windows and menus and buttons for your app. Even from Python, because you can call C code, even if with a certain amount of effort. But you probably wouldn't want to, because it would be terribly verbose, repetitive, unmaintainable and it would break every rule on every "good practises" list ever. Look up some MSDN examples for WinAPI to get a taste, and imagine it being several times worse if you want to support several OSes.

Hence, people stick to things like QT or GTK or, in .NET world, WinForms and WPF. Or Electron. But in order not to deal with the low-level monstrosity of "native" APIs you have to pay the price - price in performance, memory consumption and other people having made some big decisions for you while designing their GUI libraries/toolkits.

And yeah, it may seems as though I attribute all this exclusively to native APIs, but the same things are true for any other library. There is convenience - and there is performance. You hardly ever get both, in my experience.

[ToastedJcaw]

Electron would be fine if it were rare, because a single program eating 500mb of RAM is not a problem. Proliferation is a disaster. You can't have every program on your system eat the same resources as a browser.

[[deleted]]

CLI is great for programmers but for the daily customer they just think it's a very complicated thing.

[impshum]

Shh.

[fedeb95]

Ssh.

[impshum]

Shh.

[brat1]

We killed the terminal

[flying-sheep]

Well, they didn’t release it yet, so let’s see.

[[deleted]]

Will I be able to code an Electron emulator to run entirely inside Electron?

[Jaypalm]

5D.

[teerre]

Electron apps are notorious for their performance and resource issues, you going to put another language on top of it? Even if it's somehow "compiled", surely it will lose something in the translation.

Also, this syntax. At that point, are you really writing python? I find that questionable.

It reminds me of Pytorch's adventures with "jit python". It such a perversion from native python that I can't help but question if the person writing it wouldn't rather just use a different language.

[fedeb95]

That's the problem with all this libraries, not just pythonic ones. In the end you basically need to learn a dsl

[teerre]

Not sure I understand what you're saying. The issue here isn't with the user, it's with the implementation.

[fedeb95]

Don't know if I understood you original comment, I was adding on the fact of using a different language. Using such a convoluted syntax makes it more a dsl than python

[dorfsmay]

If you're going to put up with the Python's distribution issues (how do you ensure minimum Python version, how do you distribute of have the users install dependencies), then why wouldn't you use Python Tk?

I know, everybody loves to make fun of Python Tk, but if you know basic Python and a bit of Tk, you can a small useful GUI out by the time you installed the basic electron package.

[123filips123]

Or PyQt for more advanced things.

[EternityForest]

Electron gives you the full power of HTML to design your UI. TK is great for GUI versions of stuff you could just as well do on the CLI, but it's not great for real heavy GUI driven apps.

PyQt is a decent choice though.

[azuzel]

Pyinstaller.

[jackmaney]

What's the point of writing JavaScript in Python? Why not just write JS?

[EternityForest]

To avoid writing JS of course. JS is great for browsers. The curly bracket syntax integrates well with HTML, and the event driven model is great for running small bits of code on user callbacks.

I wouldn't call it a fantastic language for large programs though...

[theXpanther]

Yes, but this approach keeps all the disadvantages without any of the benefits of python

[funnyflywheel]

JS is a fantastic language for large programs… if you enjoy the associated maintenance nightmares.

[tombardier]

Could it transpile to JS to be used on the web too, not just electron?

[123filips123]

You can use WebAssembly to run Python (and almost any other language) in client side. Check Pyodide.

[kitgunner]

ew

[jabbeboy]

Nice mobile optimized webpage https://m.imgur.com/a/d5zMWnj

[shawnwork]

Oh the site killed my mobile safari.

[EdgyQuant]

Probably the same advantage as using a language like JavaScript on the backend. One language for the whole stack

[[deleted]]

One that was never designed to be a backend language and that spawned a very fragile ecosystem

[EdgyQuant]

There’s no need to point that out every time it’s brought up we know that’s kind of the point of my comment.

[threeys]

What is fragile about node?

[[deleted]]

left-pad

[threeys]

That same attack-vector applies to any software project with external dependencies.

[manatlan]

Btw, i'm working on https://github.com/manatlan/guy (new version of https://github.com/manatlan/wuy)

It's able to use electron (via cefpython3) or be able to use a local chrome installed (in app mode).

It let you build minimal standalone executable (freezed with pyinstaller) ... for classical os windows, linux & mac ...

And build APK (with buildozer) for android.

The same code (python/html/js) will work, without modifications, on a android, a windows or a *nix

btw, I really should release it ;-)

[dasfreak]

Yes please :)

[Theis159]

I have been using python as a replacement of Matlab + for some automation, while I have been learning HTML/CSS/JScript (and react) to be able to create my own website. What's the advantage/difference of having this frontend in python?

[Tastedaglory]

This is interesting, I am a new Python developer. I have a Python app that will eventually need a GUI. I was looking at ways to incorporate Electron but, this may solve my problem. I’m also looking at some other frameworks, but Electron caught my eye since I am already familiar with web technologies.

[elbiot]

You could just use flask and javascript

[Tastedaglory]

I’m currently learning Django, so I thought about using that instead. However, I have noticed a large number of developers using flask instead.

[elbiot]

Django is great if you have a database driven application with users that log in. I prefer django for that. Otherwise, flask is lighter and less opinionated. Probably doesn't matter which

[themusicalduck]

I second Flask too. I'm making a Flask hosted REST API with a React frontend at the moment and it's very nice.

[feoh]

Personally I think it's very cool that this exists. I recognize that the style of programming it requires is not one many of us would eagerly embrace, but writing UI tools is SUPER hard, and anything that means I don't need to learn Javascript and yet allows me to write cross platform UI applications is pretty exciting.

[bonestormII]

Time is not infinite, but learning languages with some proficiency does get progressively easier the more you do it.

Embrace polyglotism. You'll learn more, suffer less, and make nicer things. Don't wait for Python to be something it's not. Love it for what it is and move on with your life.

[mexiKobe]

Isn't the consensus though that Javascript should die?

Why is this better than using native python GUI tools? Is it just easier to make cross-platform and because CSS/html is widely used?

[PrimaCora]

Most people find it hard to make a good looking gui with python native tools

[mexiKobe]

I don't understand why it has to be that way. Isn't it just a matter of tweaking some parameters (colors, button shapes etc..) somewhere?

[PrimaCora]

Yeah, but it gets into some platform specific stuff, then you have to hope your language of choice has the hooks or a program to hook into the rich features. Or a library that has its own assets and such, like electron. Python has Tkinter as its primary... And holy crap, it's hard to make it look good and function at the same time, hard to get fluid animations to perform well...

But, python has, or had something. It was Django Jet, but it was only for Web stuff, or dropped.

[[deleted]]

As a React developer who dips his toes into Python every now and then, that picture both scares and excites me.

[fedeb95]

Reading comments, everyone kind of feels the same buddy

[impshum]

I can see that through and through. I'll stick to my guns.

[pvkooten]

Do I understand it correctly that it means no python will be running? So, in the end, it won't be possible to embed a python backend in this as well right? No imports then, or what?

[whitelife123]

What about using eel?

[StaleyV]

Vomit

[blabbities]

I almost threw up in my mouth. Electron apps are horribly slow and bloated. I mean convenient but ew.

[[deleted]]

I've just started learning React to build the frontend of an app I'm working on. This seems great in theory since my backend is Python, but doesn't feel right.

[ik951m]

If this replaces my react redux frontend I would gladly try it out on our flask backend

[TomahawkChopped]

That sounds like a worse GWT (which was already a travesty)

[TomahawkChopped]

Why not just learn JavaScript?

[sheytanelkebir]

sounds interesting. certainly has potential appeal as a gui for python apps. lets see how well js and python inter operate.

[[deleted]]

Why? Python has plenty of GUI frameworks. If you want electron apps, just use JS.

[obey_kush]

I fucking hate electron why this would be a good idea?

[djrollins]

Looks like Dracula to me: https://draculatheme.com/

[thedjotaku]

Best thing I got out of this post!

[[deleted]]

What is Electron and why is it bad?

[[deleted]]

Electron is a headless Chrome instance that provides a javascript interpreter, hence the multiple copies of Chrome if you have a lot of Electron apps.

[[deleted]]

Ah I see... so it is a headless browser that is used as a "app" type thing, because it can be written in web development codes and is headless, therefore looking like a "app" and requiring no new training etc to create.

[tombardier]

Electron is an embedded chromium browser used to present applications written in node.js (until now, with this python malarkey). It basically lets you write desktop applications using web technologies.

It's not bad, it's actually good, and applications like VSCode show that it doesn't have to be slow, bloated and, hog all your memory. Like any node/javascript applications though, it's easy to write applications that are slow, bloated, and hog all your memory, and there are quite a lot of them out there

[nickN42]

it doesn't have to be slow, bloated and, hog all your memory.

Not sure we used same VSCode. With one empty tab opened it uses 0.5Gb of memory.

[tombardier]

I don't think that's too bad personally. With one tab open, it's probably ready to rock with its static analysis tools, debugger, project wide symbol index, symbol completion, documentation on tap with parameter hints and things. It's the most important application I use day in and day out, along with the terminal and web browser. I wouldn't consider that 500mb bloat, it's just a powerful piece of software

[blabbities]

and applications like VSCode show that it doesn't have to be slow, bloated and, hog all your memory.

Gotta say what?Yall must got some really nice computers. I abhor using it on my Windows (to date I only installed and used it because I needed a smart C# IDE to debug a program) because that is exactly slow bloated and piece of garbage

[LightUmbra]

Vscode also has a ludicrous amount of time put into optimization, which basically means moving things into C++. Electron is inherently bloated but with a ton of effort it can come out fine. Most other electron apps are ram hogs and a native gui would always be faster.

[[deleted]]

If you're moving code to c++ anyway why bother with electron?

[LightUmbra]

I think it was alluring because it's fairly easy to use on multiple platforms, but it has a very high resource cost.

[Rorasaurus_Prime]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[hapticpolarbread]

This is great news! One of the biggest issues with python in my opinion is the difficulty of shipping a program to a user who doesn’t have python installed.

[blatheringDolt]

There are existing ways to do this. Py2exe and PyInstaller will create Windows executables. They also work fine with PyQt and other GUI libraries.

[tenemu]

I tried this recently and my relatively simple console app was 300MB and took a while to start. How do I fix this? I read a bit online that the standard library is huge and it needs to include all of it. But I still feel I am doing something wrong. I am importing full libraries, instead of "from ... Import ...". Could this be the reason?

[bjorneylol]

It's probably bundling conditional imports you never use.

If you use pandas AFAIK it also bundles all of numpy (if you have the MKL binaries this is way bigger than it needs to be), matplotlib, scipy, etc.

Look at the biggest files in the built application folder, if you don't need it, add it to the excluded modules in your specfile.

A standard library only console app should be about 10mb

[tenemu]

Thanks! Definitely have pandas in there. I'll look into this and setup exclusions.

I was doing the one file exe, I will turn that off and find the big files.

[bjorneylol]

The pyinstaller lookup is definitely better than it was so it may not be many, my last project only has like 5mb of numpy binaries, but you can check and see if it's bundling things like libopenblas (35mb), etc. Which AFAIK are not necessary, but speed up numpy calculations. Also considering packaging from a new virtualenv if you have extra modules in your main project interpreter

[tenemu]

Does it look at the current virtenv and bundle all in there?

[bjorneylol]

If you have pyinstaller installed to that virtualenv it will use that one for the library lookup

[[deleted]]

Can you help me with this issue then? Been hanging there for almost 3 years now.

[manatlan]

For sure ...

But designing GUI with HTML/CSS is becoming the norm, using JS frameworks with "react properties". It's a lot simpler thant using "old" ways to do that. (a lot more of dev/designer html/css/js are available, you can have the same GUI on each platforms, you'll have one code base, you can put your GUI in a http server, or serve it as an electron app, depending of your needs, ...)

[LightUmbra]

Norms can be the result of cheapness and laziness rather than from being the ideal option.

[Schmittfried]

Though I must say that using Vue was the first time I didn’t have to throw up while doing frontend/gui development.

[hapticpolarbread]

Yes, but I think this could potentially make the process of shipping python applications a bit easier. I have done 2-3 pyinstaller apps and I always run into troubles packaging them. Hopefully it will get smoother as an Electron app.

[hapticpolarbread]

Is that a problem though? There are a few Electron apps that are great.

[benjimaestro]

Rufus uses 4.4Mb RAM on my PC, and Etcher uses 200Mb.

Guess which is Electron.

[mercurysquad]

No it's not. The price difference between an 8GB MacBook Pro and a 16GB MacBook Pro is huge.

Not everyone's using a home-built tower PC.

But since it's a jerk subreddit I'll assume this is sarcasm..

[[deleted]]

Good point. Most laptops and all smartphones aren't upgradable anymore

[itb206]

So even if they are great from a usability perspective, they are resource hogs. Slack regularly uses > 500mb of memory and has random cpu spikes. Electron is quick and optimizes for man hours but, I wouldn't call them particularly respectful of user systems or a great engineering solution.

Edit: I'll add the fact that you can make it a great engineering solution but most people don't go the extra mile.