Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here? You broke them with this, and even worse with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21160833. That's not cool.
Python is a perfectly fine language for something like Calibre. I'm maintaining my growing library with it, and it's doing more than a decent job. Also I'm using Kobo utilities and it's neither prohibitively slow, nor it's useless.
If you want something pretty but basic, you can use bookworm. It's also an electron app, so you can try how it can perform.
> But it's cool, cause electron is slow, amirite guise!!?!?!?!
Sorry, but electron is literally slow and bloated. In case of Atom (the flagship app using Electron), using 600MB of RAM at the startup without the ability to load large files, or being not on par with BBEdit feature-wise, which uses 60MB at the start, is blatant waste of resources.
My Eclipse installation is using 600 MB of RAM (like Atom) out of the box with quadruple amount of features and orders of magnitude higher speed.
> Le me guess, you're the type of person that doesn't understand ROI?
I'd rather write an Atom-like application with Python, Java or similar and have much better ROI while not requiring small portable servers from my users to just edit some little scripts and push them to git(hub/lab).
Using Electron is a wrong type of investment for future of your application due to its power and space requirements, but it's cool, cause hardware is cheap, amirite guise!!?!?!?!
Honestly if someone doesn't like Calibre so much it would be better to contribute to it, or fork it.
And yes, electron sucks and it ruined desktop software because a bunch of business brats have to cut costs on software craftsmanship. This "modern UI" crap is a lie. Software using native widgets (or even JVM) is fine, but hey take it to extremes
If you’re actually talking about ruined software craftsmanship and mentioning JVM in the same paragraph, I have a hard time taking this critique seriously. (Java is great on the server — it’s not great on the desktop, which is what we are talking about)
Electron isn’t perfect and plenty of people who build apps with it make bad design and architectural decisions. But the same could be said for any other cross-platform framework or language. There are trade-offs, period.
Meanwhile I like Electron/web-stack for desktop applications I can write plugins for. I like classic DOM + HTML + CSS + JS tech. I've written scratch-my-own-itch plugins for VSCode/Atom that I never would've written if it was Javafx or Swing or something. And I also benefit when other people find it as hackable because it uses such familiar tech -- the ecosystem benefits.
I'd wager most of us that dislike Electron aren't at the point that we're so desperate for software, that we would lower our standards regarding usability, resource consumption and platform integration.
For me it's definitely not a problem that I'm missing software X which is only available as an Electron app. The Electron apps I use are required to interact with some piece of hardware (syncing, etc) and have completely custom UIs, which work most of the time, but have super-weird limitations or UX bugs, because you can't reinvent decades of UX on all platforms without forgetting or messing up several things.
And then there's MS Teams, which proves either that Microsoft can't write working software, or that Electron isn't able to offer a way of building working software. Probably both.
Counterpoint: Visual Studio Code is great software from Microsoft that was built on Electron. However, it's the ONLY app I've ever seen built on Electron that isn't a slow and voracious consumer of all resources on a system.
