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Electron vs Julia: What are the differences?
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User Base and Purpose: Electron is a framework that allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, targeting users who prefer desktop applications over web applications. On the other hand, Julia is a high-level, high-performance programming language specifically designed for numerical and scientific computing, offering a wide range of mathematical functions and libraries.
Runtime Environment: Electron applications run on the Chromium browser and Node.js runtime, providing the ability to use browser APIs and Node.js modules for various functionalities. In contrast, Julia code is executed by the Julia runtime environment, which directly interprets and compiles the code for efficient numerical computations.
Platform Compatibility: Electron applications can be easily packaged and deployed on multiple platforms such as Windows, macOS, and Linux without major modifications, ensuring consistent user experience across different operating systems. Conversely, Julia supports multiple platforms but may require some adjustments in code or dependencies when moving between different operating systems or architectures.
Community and Ecosystem: Electron has a robust community and extensive ecosystem of plugins, libraries, and tools, making it easier for developers to find solutions and resources for common development tasks. On the contrary, Julia also has a growing community and ecosystem, with a focus on mathematical and scientific computing, offering specialized packages and support for numerical algorithms.
Learning Curve and Complexity: Developing with Electron requires knowledge of web technologies and frameworks, as well as understanding how to communicate between the frontend and backend components of the application. In contrast, Julia's syntax and design are tailored towards mathematical programming, making it easier for scientists and researchers to prototype and implement complex computational algorithms.
Performance and Scalability: Electron applications may suffer from performance issues due to the overhead of running on a browser engine and Node.js runtime, especially when handling intensive computations or large datasets. Meanwhile, Julia is renowned for its speed and performance, thanks to its just-in-time compilation and efficient handling of numerical operations, making it a preferred choice for high-performance computing tasks.
In Summary, Electron is a versatile framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies, while Julia is a high-performance programming language tailored for numerical and scientific computing, offering efficient computations and specialized libraries.
After writing a project in Julia we decided to stick with Kotlin. Julia is a nice language and has superb REPL support, but poor tooling and the lack of reproducibility of the program runs makes it too expensive to work with. Kotlin on the other hand now has nice Jupyter support, which mostly covers REPL requirements.
Pros of Electron
- Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications69
- Open source53
- Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code14
- Because it's cross platform8
- Use Node.js in the Main Process4
Pros of Julia
- Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation25
- Designed for parallelism and distributed computation22
- Free and Open Source19
- Dynamic Type System17
- Calling C functions directly17
- Multiple Dispatch16
- Lisp-like Macros16
- Powerful Shell-like Capabilities10
- Jupyter notebook integration10
- REPL8
- String handling4
- Emojis as variable names4
- Interoperability3
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Cons of Electron
- Uses a lot of memory19
- User experience never as good as a native app8
- No proper documentation4
- Does not native4
- Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs1
- Wrong reference for dom inspection1
Cons of Julia
- Immature library management system5
- Slow program start4
- JIT compiler is very slow3
- Poor backwards compatibility3
- Bad tooling2
- No static compilation2