1 Apr 2025
Occasionally I want to build some throwaway app for use by other people. CLIs are nice and all, but they're hard to launch from VR, and most people have never interacted with a terminal. So I need some way to write a GUI. Enter electron.
Electron is a cross-platform UI framework. It bundles an entire chromium install (gross) but in return you can basically just use standard web dev practices.
It exposes a two-process model: one main process, and one renderer process. The main process has basically unfettered access to the OS, and the renderer process has unfettered access to the DOM (document object model - the runtime structure of an HTML webpage). The two processes talk to each other through channels.
Generating a distributable is easy with forge-cli. My main nitpick here is that I think the default maker should be the zip maker, not the installer. Installers give me the headache that I have to remember to uninstall the thing once it most likely fails to work. Isolated environments with no hidden side effects are simply better. Switching to zip is simple matter of editing the default `forge.config.js` and moving 'win32' to the maker-zip block. The generated .zip works basically as expected: it contains a bunch of dependencies, and an .exe. Put the .zip in a directory, extract it, double click the .exe, and you app opens. (One more nit: the zip should contain a subdirectory so you can extract without manually creating a directory for it.)
The hello world package is heavy but not as bad as I expected: 10.6MB disk (compressed), 282MB disk (uncompressed), 0.0% CPU, 65MB memory. Memory is basically in line with what I was getting with wxWidgets - I think that was around 30 MB with my entire STT app built in. Worse but IMO within the realm of reasonability. Time to first draw is pretty good - under a second according to the eyeball test.
20 Mar 2025
