Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Electron

11.4K
9.9K
+ 1
148
Golang

22.5K
13.8K
+ 1
3.3K
Add tool

Electron vs Go: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of software development, there are numerous tools and technologies available to build applications. Two popular options are Electron and Go. While both are used for application development, they have distinct differences that set them apart. This article will outline six key differences between Electron and Go.

1. Electron: Web Development Framework: Electron is a web development framework that allows developers to create desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This means that developers with web development skills can easily transition into building desktop apps without the need for learning new programming languages or frameworks.

2. Go: Compiled Programming Language: On the other hand, Go is a compiled programming language that is known for its efficiency and simplicity. It was specifically designed to address the challenges faced by large-scale software development projects. With Go, developers can write highly performant and scalable applications.

3. Electron: Cross-platform Compatibility: One of the key advantages of Electron is its ability to create applications that run seamlessly on multiple operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. This cross-platform compatibility greatly simplifies the process of app development and deployment, as developers can target a wide range of users without the need for platform-specific customization.

4. Go: Concurrency and Scalability: Go is renowned for its built-in support for concurrency and scalability. Its lightweight goroutines enable developers to write concurrent code easily. Additionally, Go's efficient memory management and garbage collection make it an excellent choice for building scalable and high-performance applications, particularly in scenarios where real-time processing and synchronization are required.

5. Electron: Rich User Interface: Electron provides extensive tools and libraries for creating rich and interactive user interfaces. Developers can take advantage of popular web development frameworks like React or Angular to build modern and visually appealing desktop apps. Electron's powerful rendering engine enables the seamless integration of web content into desktop applications, resulting in a visually compelling user experience.

6. Go: Low Memory Footprint: While Electron is known for its versatility, it can have a higher memory footprint due to its reliance on web technologies. On the other hand, Go is highly efficient in terms of memory consumption. It has a small footprint, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments. This makes Go an excellent choice for building lightweight applications or services that need to run on devices with limited resources.

In Summary, Electron is a web development framework that offers cross-platform compatibility and rich user interface capabilities, while Go is a compiled programming language known for its concurrency, scalability, and low memory footprint. By understanding the key differences between these two technologies, developers can make informed decisions on which tool to use based on their specific project requirements.

Advice on Electron and Golang
Needs advice
on
GolangGolangPythonPython
and
React NativeReact Native

I've been juggling with an app idea and am clueless about how to build it.

A little about the app:

  • Social network type app ,
  • Users can create different directories, in those directories post images and/or text that'll be shared on a public dashboard .

Directory creation is the main point of this app. Besides there'll be rooms(groups),chatting system, search operations similar to instagram,push notifications

I have two options:

  1. React Native, Python, AWS stack or
  2. Flutter, Go ( I don't know what stack or tools to use)
See more
Replies (6)
George Krachtopoulos
Recommends
on
PythonPython

Currently, I have decided to use Python and JavaScript (especially React and Node.js) for any of my projects. Well, I have used Python with Django for a lot of things, and I would certainly recommend Django to anyone, due to its high secure authentication and authorization inbuilt system, a ready to use admin platform, template tags, and many more. Well, I guess that you would like to use Python to create the backend of your application, an API, and React Native for the frontend. Python and JavaScript (React) are on the trend these days and have a huge community, so there are many resources, tutorials, great documentation. I have not really heard anyone using Flutter and Go for applications these days, so I would not recommend it to you, it would make your life much more difficult.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your project!

See more
Tony Chong
Principal & Founder at Airwave Tech · | 6 upvotes · 377.6K views
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

I'm typically agnostic when it comes to picking languages. Whatever gets the job done, but, in this case, to figure out what's involved with what you want to do, it's going to be much more than just picking programming languages for your client and backend interfaces.

So, I'm recommending you use Flutter+Firebase as a way to figure out what you need to get done. It supports both iOS and Android out of the box, introduces you to a bunch of components you will need to think about in the future (whether you stick with Firebase or not), and the key here, is that there are tons of articles, youtube videos, and other courses you can take to pick it up pretty quickly. You could even clone an Instagram knockoff from github. Guess what else, it's all free. You might not need to worry as much about the backend since there are client libraries for Flutter/Dart for Firebase.

Some might have different opinions, and like I said, I'm usually agnostic, but in this case, you have a lot to consider. Where are you going to store the data? Are people going to need to login? Will there but customized settings the will save even if I close the app? Yeah, that's just a few questions.

Those are just a few. Lots to consider, so if you want to get something in your hand as soon as possible, try a search for flutter + firebase + chat + Instagram or something like that and have a look.

See more
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

If this is for learning about how to design the system, then pick the tools are you are confortable with.

Often times, I get stuck picking the tools (and trying to learn about them) vs actually trying to design the system itself.

If you are familiar with React (check out Expo) and Django then I would recommend going with that.

For deploying your backend, I would go with a provider like https://zeit.co/ that automates a whole bunch of deployment steps with their cli tools that you might have to do with AWS.

See more
Emmanuel Kayode
Software Engineer at Teamapt Ltd · | 3 upvotes · 374.4K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

The above listed tools will do the job, you just need to figure out your architecture(e.g models). How they will all connect. Then you can use a tool you are comfortable with to implement them.

See more
Charles Nelson
Recommends
on
PythonPython

What you need to take a look at is Apache OpenMeetings. It already does what you want, it is open source and well documented and only requires that you design the UI and plumbing required to serve you application.

See more
Adam Ha
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Let's select right tool you feel you are good at. And selecting tools are used by large community to solve your stuck if encounter

See more
Needs advice
on
GolangGolangJavaScriptJavaScript
and
PythonPython

We are converting AWS Lambdas from Java due to excessive cold start times. Usage: These lambdas handle XML and JSON payloads, they use s3, API Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB, and external API's. Most of our developers are only experienced in java. These three languages (Go, Node.js, and Python) were discussed, but no consensus has been reached yet.

See more
Replies (5)
Jordan Gregory
Cloud Operations Manager at Plainsight AI · | 4 upvotes · 428.5K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

I've worked with all three of these languages and also with Java developers converting to these languages and far and away Go is the easier one to convert to. With the improved cold-start times and the ease of conversion for a Java developer, it is a no-brainer for me.

The hardest part of the conversion though is going to be the lack of traditional Classes so you have to be mindful of that, but Go Structs and interfaces tend to make up for what is lost there.

Full Disclosure: I'm a 95% Go convert (from Python) at this point in time.

See more
Ahmet Yildirim
Software Engineering Consultant at UXCraft Sweden AB · | 3 upvotes · 428.6K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

Although I am primarily a Javascript developer myself, I used Go to build AWS lambda in a similar scenario to yours. AWS libraries felt better integrated on the Go side, I believe due to the language itself (e.g. how JSON objects are handled in go). Besides that performance of Go is much superior. But on the cons side; community is far smaller around Go, compared to Javascript. That is easy notice if you look at repos of community-maintained libraries for Go. That can feel a bit unreliable.

See more
Jason Scheirer
Senior Software Engineer at EasyPost · | 2 upvotes · 428.1K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

Go would provide the easiest transition for Java programmers -- its IDE/tooling is second to none (just install Goland) and the deploy/distribution story is extremely clean and lends itself to work well in lambda: single, static binaries with quick startup. No need to set up a full environment or package dependencies on your lambda AMIs, just copy a file.

See more
Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 1 upvotes · 428.1K views
Recommends
on
JavaScriptJavaScript
at

If you want to prioritise language familiarity, JavaScript is more like Java than the other choices; and it can be optimised to run very fast. However if you need really fast cold-start times, you can't beat Go since it's compiled. There are other things to consider, such as the massive amount of community packages and help/documentation in the JavaScript ecosystem. Go is newer but seems to be quite popular if you need something that runs fast in a single binary.

See more
Paul Whittemore
Developer and Owner at Appurist Software · | 1 upvotes · 428.1K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

I was initially going to suggest JavaScript due to the smaller size needs of AWS Lambdas code and the larger range of libraries and community available (and to avoid Python for this). But I have to agree with the recommendations and rationale of @ayildirim above and I think you should choose any reasonable language that is low-overhead, fast startup, and best supported by AWS Lambda, and that is probably Go. I don't think you are likely to go wrong with that, while you can potentially with the others.

So I'd agree, on the strength of AWS Lambda support and the solid performance of Go, it seems like your best choice here for Lambdas (and I'm going to need to consider that myself going forward... pardon the pun).

See more
Needs advice
on
GolangGolangNode.jsNode.js
and
ScalaScala

Finding the best server-side tool for building a personal information organizer that focuses on performance, simplicity, and scalability.

performance and scalability get a prototype going fast by keeping codebase simple find hosting that is affordable and scales well (Java/Scala-based ones might not be affordable)

See more
Replies (1)
David Annez
VP Product at loveholidays · | 5 upvotes · 314.2K views
Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js
at

I've picked Node.js here but honestly it's a toss up between that and Go around this. It really depends on your background and skillset around "get something going fast" for one of these languages. Based on not knowing that I've suggested Node because it can be easier to prototype quickly and built right is performant enough. The scaffolding provided around Node.js services (Koa, Restify, NestJS) means you can get up and running pretty easily. It's important to note that the tooling surrounding this is good also, such as tracing, metrics et al (important when you're building production ready services).

You'll get more scalability and perf from go, but balancing them out I would say that you'll get pretty far with a well built Node.JS service (our entire site with over 1.5k requests/m scales easily and holds it's own with 4 pods in production.

Without knowing the scale you are building for and the systems you are using around it it's hard to say for certain this is the right route.

See more
Decisions about Electron and Golang
William Artero
Senior Platform Engineer at ABN AMRO · | 6 upvotes · 395.5K views

Telegram Messenger has frameworks for most known languages, which makes easier for anyone to integrate with them. I started with Golang and soon found that those frameworks are not up to date, not to mention my experience testing on Golang is also mixed due to how their testing tool works. The natural runner-up was JS, which I'm ditching in favor of TS to make a strongly typed code, proper tests and documentation for broader usage. TypeScript allows fast prototyping and can prevent problems during code phase, given that your IDE of choice has support for a language server, and build phase. Pairing it with lint tools also allows honing code before it even hits the repositories.

See more
awesomebanana2018

1. Type safety and inferred types

Go is type safe by default, which allows you to right more reliable code and have better developer tooling, plus with the := operator, you can initialize a variable without having to define its type because it automatically gets its type from the initial value.

2. Performance

There isn't much to be said here, but on most counts go beats both Python and Node.js on performance.

3. Documentation

I'm not talking about the Go language itself, although it does have good docs. I'm talking about Go's auto generated documentation tool, which allows people to document their packages easily and works amazingly with Go's type system.

4. Compiles to binary

If you are making a local program for somebody and they don't want to download the Go compiler, you can make Go into a native binary.

5. Built for the web

Go has built in Http libraries to rival Express.js and has a HTML/Text templating system.

6. Great Concurrency

Go utilizes Goroutines to help developers utilize multiple threads easily.

Conclusion

Go is an excellent choice for any system code, especially http networking and web backends.

See more
Erik Ralston
Chief Architect at LiveTiles · | 14 upvotes · 590.6K views

C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.

See more
Brent Maxwell

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

See more
Chose
GolangGolang
over
JavaJava

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

See more
Roman Glushko
Machine Learning, Software Engineering and Life · | 3 upvotes · 373.7K views

I chose Golang as a language to write Tango because it's super easy to get started with. I also considered Rust, but learning curve of it is much higher than in Golang. I felt like I would need to spend an endless amount of time to even get the hello world app working in Rust. While easy to learn, Golang still shows good performance, multithreading out of the box and fun to implement.

I also could choose PHP and create a phar-based tool, but I was not sure that it would be a good choice as I want to scale to be able to process Gbs of access log data

See more
Ítalo Vietro
VP Platform Engineering at UrbanSportsClub · | 7 upvotes · 248.7K views

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

See more

This language, even in early dev stages is to put it simply, fantastic! It is small, fast, and types a lot like go. It feels complete even though coming out less than a year ago in first early stages. I love it, it works anywhere and everywhere plus making binaries and GUI applications is just super easy!

See more
Jordan Gregory
Cloud Operations Manager at Plainsight AI · | 3 upvotes · 161.4K views
Migrated
from
PythonPython
to
GolangGolang

A number of years ago; I had done python for a long time prior to learning about Go. Most of what I wrote was system-like things and web-things in python, and I got tired of running into the lack-of-a-type-system problems that python gave me. I wanted to switch to a compiled, strongly-typed system that wasn't C/C++ (been there, done that, got the "shoot yourself in the foot" t-shirt). I looked into both Rust/Go, and for what I wanted to do (system/web) stuff ... at the time, Go was the strongest candidate, so I switched and never went back. Recently I started to re-look at Rust for system things, but for anything I do that I have to touch the web with, it will be Go from now on.

See more
Russtopia Labs
Sr. Doodad Imagineer at Russtopia Labs · | 0 upvote · 220K views

As a personal research project I wanted to add post-quantum crypto KEM (key encapsulation) algorithms and new symmetric crypto session algorithms to openssh. I found the openssh code and its channel/context management extremely complex.

Concurrently, I was learning Go. It occurred to me that Go's excellent standard library, including crypto libraries, plus its much safer memory model and string/buffer handling would be better suited to a secure remote shell solution. So I started from scratch, writing a clean-room Go-based solution, without regard for ssh compatibility. Interactive and token-based login, secure copy and tunnels.

Of course, it needs a proper security audit for side channel attacks, protocol vulnerabilities and so on -- but I was impressed by how much simpler a client-server application with crypto and complex terminal handling was in Go.

$ sloc openssh-portable 
  Languages  Files    Code  Comment  Blank   Total  CodeLns
      Total    502  112982    14327  15705  143014   100.0%
          C    389  105938    13349  14416  133703    93.5%
      Shell     92    6118      937   1129    8184     5.7%
       Make     16     468       37    131     636     0.4%
        AWK      1     363        0      7     370     0.3%
        C++      3      79        4     18     101     0.1%
       Conf      1      16        0      4      20     0.0%
$ sloc xs
  Languages  Files  Code  Comment  Blank  Total  CodeLns
      Total     34  3658     1231    655   5544   100.0%
         Go     19  3230     1199    507   4936    89.0%
   Markdown      2   181        0     76    257     4.6%
       Make      7   148        4     50    202     3.6%
       YAML      1    39        0      5     44     0.8%
       Text      1    30        0      7     37     0.7%
     Modula      1    16        0      2     18     0.3%
      Shell      3    14       28      8     50     0.9%

https://gogs.blitter.com/RLabs/xs

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Electron
Pros of Golang
  • 69
    Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications
  • 53
    Open source
  • 14
    Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code
  • 8
    Because it's cross platform
  • 4
    Use Node.js in the Main Process
  • 553
    High-performance
  • 397
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 364
    Fun to write
  • 303
    Easy concurrency support via goroutines
  • 273
    Fast compilation times
  • 195
    Goroutines
  • 181
    Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy
  • 151
    Simple compile build/run procedures
  • 137
    Backed by google
  • 137
    Great community
  • 53
    Garbage collection built-in
  • 47
    Built-in Testing
  • 44
    Excellent tools - gofmt, godoc etc
  • 40
    Elegant and concise like Python, fast like C
  • 37
    Awesome to Develop
  • 26
    Used for Docker
  • 26
    Flexible interface system
  • 25
    Great concurrency pattern
  • 24
    Deploy as executable
  • 21
    Open-source Integration
  • 19
    Easy to read
  • 17
    Fun to write and so many feature out of the box
  • 17
    Go is God
  • 14
    Powerful and simple
  • 14
    Easy to deploy
  • 14
    Its Simple and Heavy duty
  • 14
    Concurrency
  • 13
    Best language for concurrency
  • 11
    Safe GOTOs
  • 11
    Rich standard library
  • 10
    Clean code, high performance
  • 10
    Easy setup
  • 10
    High performance
  • 9
    Simplicity, Concurrency, Performance
  • 8
    Cross compiling
  • 8
    Single binary avoids library dependency issues
  • 8
    Hassle free deployment
  • 7
    Used by Giants of the industry
  • 7
    Simple, powerful, and great performance
  • 7
    Gofmt
  • 6
    Garbage Collection
  • 5
    WYSIWYG
  • 5
    Very sophisticated syntax
  • 5
    Excellent tooling
  • 4
    Keep it simple and stupid
  • 4
    Widely used
  • 4
    Kubernetes written on Go
  • 2
    No generics
  • 1
    Looks not fancy, but promoting pragmatic idioms
  • 1
    Operator goto

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Electron
Cons of Golang
  • 19
    Uses a lot of memory
  • 8
    User experience never as good as a native app
  • 4
    No proper documentation
  • 4
    Does not native
  • 1
    Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
  • 1
    Wrong reference for dom inspection
  • 42
    You waste time in plumbing code catching errors
  • 25
    Verbose
  • 23
    Packages and their path dependencies are braindead
  • 16
    Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly
  • 15
    Dependency management when working on multiple projects
  • 10
    Automatic garbage collection overheads
  • 8
    Uncommon syntax
  • 7
    Type system is lacking (no generics, etc)
  • 5
    Collection framework is lacking (list, set, map)
  • 3
    Best programming language
  • 1
    A failed experiment to combine c and python

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Electron?

With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

What is Golang?

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Electron?
What companies use Golang?
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Electron?
What tools integrate with Golang?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

DigitalOcean

GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
2
2467
Nov 20 2019 at 3:38AM

OneSignal

PostgreSQLRedisRuby+8
9
4760
Oct 3 2019 at 7:13PM

Ably Realtime

JavaScriptPythonNode.js+8
5
3908
Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

Twilio SendGrid

GitHubDockerKafka+10
11
10058
What are some alternatives to Electron and Golang?
Photon
The fastest way to build beautiful Electron apps using simple HTML and CSS. Underneath it all is Electron. Originally built for GitHub's Atom text editor, Electron is the easiest way to build cross-platform desktop applications.
React Native Desktop
Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.
React Native
React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
See all alternatives