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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Desktop Development
  5. Electron vs Julia

Electron vs Julia

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Electron
Electron
Stacks11.6K
Followers10.0K
Votes148
Julia
Julia
Stacks666
Followers677
Votes171
GitHub Stars47.9K
Forks5.7K

Electron vs Julia: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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Advice on Electron, Julia

Semih
Semih

Software Engineering Manager

Oct 1, 2020

Needs adviceonJavaScriptJavaScriptHTML5HTML5.NET.NET

Hi,

We are planning to develop a brand new UX for an already existing desktop software. The previous version is developed on C#.NET with Winforms & WPF. Our plan is to use JavaScript/HTML5 based frontend technologies for the new software. For some components, we are highly dependent on .NET/ .NET Core because the JS-based versions are not mature enough.

What would you choose for a desktop-based Engineering Software that supports multi-OS and has rich UI capabilities considering the .NET dependencies?

Thanks in advance,

Semih

57.9k views57.9k
Comments
Alexander
Alexander

Senior researcher at MIPT

Oct 27, 2020

Decided

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.

188k views188k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Electron
Electron
Julia
Julia

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.

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
47.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
11.6K
Stacks
666
Followers
10.0K
Followers
677
Votes
148
Votes
171
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 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
Cons
  • 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
Pros
  • 25
    Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation
  • 22
    Designed for parallelism and distributed computation
  • 19
    Free and Open Source
  • 17
    Dynamic Type System
  • 17
    Calling C functions directly
Cons
  • 5
    Immature library management system
  • 4
    Slow program start
  • 3
    JIT compiler is very slow
  • 3
    Poor backwards compatibility
  • 2
    Bad tooling
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Azure Web App for Containers
Azure Web App for Containers
GitLab
GitLab
Slack
Slack
C++
C++
Rust
Rust
C lang
C lang
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
vscode.dev
vscode.dev
Python
Python

What are some alternatives to Electron, Julia?

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Elm

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

Racket

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

Sciter

Sciter

It brings a stack of web technologies to desktop UI development. Web designers, and developers, can reuse their experience and expertise in creating modern looking desktop applications.

wxWidgets

wxWidgets

It is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. It has popular language bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and many other languages, and unlike other cross-platform toolkits, it gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. It's also extensive, free, open-source and mature.

PureScript

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Composer

Composer

It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

Qt5

Qt5

It is a full development framework with tools designed to streamline the creation of applications and user interfaces for desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.

pnpm

pnpm

It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. When using npm or Yarn for example, if you have 100 projects using the same version of lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be saved in a single place on the disk and a hard link will put it into the node_modules where it should be installed.

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