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Electrobun: Cross-platform desktop applications written in TypeScript

(electrobun.dev)
323 points CharlesW | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 23:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.813s | source
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throwaway888abc ◴[21 Nov 24 06:52 UTC] No.42201803[source]▶
"...and cross-platform desktop applications" the homepage says

But, Sadly, this is mac only[0] no windows or linux ? Do I understand it correctly ?

[0] https://electrobun.dev/docs/guides/Compatability

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NoahKAndrews ◴[21 Nov 24 08:40 UTC] No.42202312[source]▶
Looks like they're planning to only ever support building on Mac, but they plan to support running on Windows and Linux in the future
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jclulow ◴[21 Nov 24 08:42 UTC] No.42202321[source]▶
Wild that one would pick the only platform with a rubbish VMs and CI story as the OS to use for building software!
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veidr ◴[21 Nov 24 12:16 UTC] No.42203561[source]▶
What's wild about it? It's one person, and they probably mainly use a Mac. If they used Windows, it would be Windows-only at this stage. I have lots of projects that only run on Linux. Clearly, if the project succeeds and gains tractions, the other platforms will come.
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gorjusborg ◴[21 Nov 24 14:15 UTC] No.42204502[source]▶
It assume it will severely limit its uptake.

If I had to pick one platform to build on, it would be linux. Pretty much every platform has the ability to run linux executables (via Docker, among others).

If this is a personal project, that's cool, but then I really don't care that much. On the other hand, I think an electron-like with something like Bun could be really useful.

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stickfigure ◴[21 Nov 24 14:42 UTC] No.42204740[source]▶
At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop. Even (especially!) the ones that deploy exclusively on linux.

Having to run a docker container to get the dev env setup would be even more likely to slow adoption. Nobody wants to do that shit.

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1. nocman ◴[21 Nov 24 19:41 UTC] No.42207828[source]▶
> At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop.

Not according to statista.com (I am not a registered user, but it looks like you could register for no cost, in order to check the source):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...

Windows is the majority OS for development, with Unix/Linux and Mac being close to equal, but both considerably less than Windows.

This is also consistent with the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/):

Under the "Operating System" heading it says:

  "Windows is the most popular operating system for developers, across both personal and professional use."
[edited to include Stack Overflow survey]
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2. eyjafjallajokul ◴[21 Nov 24 21:03 UTC] No.42208625[source]▶
They said "in the US". The data you have provided says "Worldwide" which doesnt prove the point about the US.
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3. nocman ◴[21 Nov 24 21:23 UTC] No.42208803[source]▶
fair point, however I suspect that if you narrow the scope of the data to the US (even the data from those surveys) it will not change the results much.

Out of curiosity, I'm looking for data that is limited to the US, and will respond with results if I find them.

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4. nocman ◴[21 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42209404{3}[source]▶
JetBrains makes their survey data available here ( https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/ ):

Based on my calculations from that data (extracting only the US responses, based on their entries for 'os_devenv', I get these numbers:

- Linux: 45% - Windows: 58.9 % - Mac: 51.2 %

That is conclusive enough for me to say that Windows is still the most common daily driver for developers in the US. I'm not one of those developers, as I don't use Windows as my primary development platform.

I suspect this may be a case where people tend to think that because most developers they know use a particular OS for development, that must be true everywhere.

I would not be surprised, for instance, to find out that the numbers of developers primarily using Macs at some big tech companies is much higher.

[edited for formatting]