nukeop/nuclear

## What if I am religiously opposed to using Electron?

Then you are not the target audience of this program. See [mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube) for a similar program that will not taint your machine with a library you happen to dislike.

It's clear that highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. When pressed for reasons what exactly is so bad about Electron, they can rarely offer anything than vaguely mumbled "memory usage" or "b-but it's an entire browser" (both of which have not been true for years, for example Electron's memory usage has improved dramatically, but the meme stuck). The programming world is filled with people who read angry rants about why library X or Y sucks and you should hate it, then repeat whatever they remember because they think whining makes them seem smart, without critically examining whether it makes sense or not.

## The reasons behind Electron

* It's fun to develop for
* It uses as much resources as a single browser tab, if used in a sane way
* It provides a low barrier to entry for contributors
* It lets us easily build and deploy to all major desktop platforms (various Linux distros, MacOS, Windows)
* It lets us use React for managing the GUI
* There is no good alternative that would provide all these benefits (don't get me started on qt - try using their designer)
* The users don't care about the technology you use to build your app

With experience comes a certain appreciation of tradeoffs you take when building software and while Electron is not the perfect solution for every use case, it's certainly good enough for what I was trying to achieve with Nuclear.