[Python-ideas] Using Python for end user applications

[Michel Desmoulin]

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 at 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.
>