This could change when webassembly is stable. If we manage to make a Python => webassembly compiler, I doubt it will make Python in the browser happen. But it certainly can make Python in NodeJS happen, and so in Electron apps. Le 09/02/2017 à 19:56, Nick Coghlan a écrit :

On 7 February 2017 at 15:47, Thomas Kluyver <thomas@kluyver.me.uk> wrote:

...

I've been thinking for a while about Python apps using Electron (Positron? ;-). It's an interesting idea from the Python side, but I struggle to come up with reasons why developing an Electron+Python app would be easier than developing a regular Electron app. I prefer writing Python to Javascript, but you'd need quite a bit of Javascript anyway, you don't have to care about browser compatibility, and there would inevitably be some extra friction in using two languages.

I'm sure there are use cases where it makes sense, like if you use Python's scientific computing ecosystem. But I don't know how broad they are.

I'd say the rationale for Electron/Python apps is the same as that for any JS frontend/Python backend configuration - JS/CSS/HTML5 is a great suite of technologies for defining user interfaces, but you don't necessarily want to be writing all your application logic in it. (You certainly *can*, you just may not want to)

The trade-offs are different for client-side apps (since shipping two different language runtimes is kinda horrible, given neither V8 nor CPython is particularly lightweight), but it's not *that* different from the traditional Python GUI app development model of depending on a C/C++ toolkit like Tcl/Tk, Gtk, Qt, or wxWidgets.

It's just that the modern GUI toolkit is called V8, most of the actual GUI bits are written in JavaScript rather than C/C++, and the language independent in-process bindings got fairly dramatically worse along the way :)

Cheers, Nick.

This could change when webassembly is stable. If we manage to make a Python => webassembly compiler, I doubt it will make Python in the browser happen. But it certainly can make Python in NodeJS happen, and so in Electron apps. Le 09/02/2017 à 19:56, Nick Coghlan a écrit :

On 7 February 2017 at 15:47, Thomas Kluyver <thomas@kluyver.me.uk> wrote:

...

I've been thinking for a while about Python apps using Electron (Positron? ;-). It's an interesting idea from the Python side, but I struggle to come up with reasons why developing an Electron+Python app would be easier than developing a regular Electron app. I prefer writing Python to Javascript, but you'd need quite a bit of Javascript anyway, you don't have to care about browser compatibility, and there would inevitably be some extra friction in using two languages.

I'm sure there are use cases where it makes sense, like if you use Python's scientific computing ecosystem. But I don't know how broad they are.

I'd say the rationale for Electron/Python apps is the same as that for any JS frontend/Python backend configuration - JS/CSS/HTML5 is a great suite of technologies for defining user interfaces, but you don't necessarily want to be writing all your application logic in it. (You certainly *can*, you just may not want to)

The trade-offs are different for client-side apps (since shipping two different language runtimes is kinda horrible, given neither V8 nor CPython is particularly lightweight), but it's not *that* different from the traditional Python GUI app development model of depending on a C/C++ toolkit like Tcl/Tk, Gtk, Qt, or wxWidgets.

It's just that the modern GUI toolkit is called V8, most of the actual GUI bits are written in JavaScript rather than C/C++, and the language independent in-process bindings got fairly dramatically worse along the way :)

Cheers, Nick.