WTF is going on in web development nowadays that makes people ask me to compile C# projects to Electron?

Let that sink. I'm being asked to compile a C# project that can run as a beautifully integrated seamless *native* and lightning fast application... to JS so it would run as a *website* in the Electron *browser*. Am I the only one seeing how much cancer that is?

Why does node-sass have such garbage documentation?!
I've now spent over an hour trying to get a clear and concise answer to how that shit works, and what do I get? This: (see picture)

I don't know what any of that means, nor do they care to tell me.
I don't want to render this shit at runtime, I want it to compile the sass code when I make changes to it so my app doesn't get boggled down by unnecessary background processes.
But nooo of course not.
To top it off, the "easy" electron-compile solution doesn't even fucking compile because all its dependencies are either outdated or 404 on me. 😡

It's shit like this that makes me hate web-style development. Lacking documentation and people who just assume everything is logical and clear from the start. It's fucking not.

Boss says electron-app needs to run on win/mac/linux, but we cannot compile for mac, because we have none. And we cannot use TravisCI for reasons. Welp.

can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.

they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)

the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.

the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.

flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.

it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.

animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.

you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.

oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.

oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

FUCK ELECTRON-COMPILE
FUCK ELECTRON-PREBUILT-COMPILE
FUCK STUPID TOOLS AND FRAMEWORK

IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS FUCKING HARD TO COMPILE AN ELECTRON APP WITH TYPESCRIPT

been exploring the options for cross platform desktop app, and i found :
java : both awt and swing look ugly, i really like OOP of java, and the way projects are organized is easy to scale, but i need to deploy the jdk, and the speed on gui apps isn't that great
C# : (.net/ mono, i can't grasp F# and vb is stupid) looks native on windows, not so much alien on both linux/mac, and being a java cousin is a pro, i found the Eto library for mono even looks more native on *ix than winforms
wxwidgets: for C/C++ so far this looks like the best option for total native feel and performance, but man i fucking hate C code, and this looks a lot like C code, even with proper native Cpp support, maybe i should dive deeper in it
GTK+ : did any one mention C code ? because this mother fucker is plain C with macros all over the place, it made me realize why wx is promoted as Cpp friendly, i doubt I'll use this
tcl/tk : even tho ive never wrote a single line of tcl in my life, the tk lib is the default ui for both python and ruby on all supported platforms,
and i really love ruby, and Python is Usually a joy to work with
Qt : this by far looks like the best option, proper OOP in C++, bindings for python (ruby binds are outdated), almost native look and feel on supported platforms, and even has a gui builder in xml or json/js (qml) however i bet I'll use such a thing, the building tho depends on an external preprocessor "moc" and some wicked macros, also makes working with templates a fucking mess, and the heavy dependence on QObject inheritance makes integrating external libraries a bit more tiring, the signal slot system makes more sense in python than in C++, since it makes me confused about the flow of the code
lazarus: is a freepascal implementation that looks and feels like delphi, not so much for native look and feel, but good performance and easy language to handle
electron : this fat mofo is fat, it's the slowest of all options, if i want an html app, I'll just compile a stripped down webkit and deploy that
what do you think ? and did i miss something ?