Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Pharo vs Javascript / GitHub Electron, the Slant community recommends Pharo for most people. In the question“What are the best languages to write a desktop Linux application in?” Pharo is ranked 10th while Javascript / GitHub Electron is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Pharo is:
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Object-Oriented
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Pro Easily learnt
There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired.
Pro Live updates
The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time.
Pro Highly productive
Pro Seaside
The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably.
Pro Remote debugging
Pro Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE
No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too).
Pro Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector
Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code.
Pro Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment
Pro 64 bit support as of Pharo 7
Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux.
Pro Advanced code analysis tools
MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement.
Pro Can run headless for production
Pro Really simple networking and REST with Zinc
Pro Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal
Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work.
Pro Works on Linux, Windows, Mac
Being powered by Javascript, apps build with Electron can be packed to run on all 3 platforms.
Pro Wide spread support
Javascript is a very easy language to learn, and is handy for all manner of other things. There's a good chance you already know it, or that you will need to know it in the future.
Pro WebApps without additional work
If you don't require native features and could write a web app (i.e. a website with dynamic elements), then you could just extend it and turn it into a native app. This means that people just need to type your URL to use you app and may get more by downloading and installing it.
Cons
Con Small community
But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous.
Con Odd language
Requires a different mindset. Much harder to apply what you know from popular or conventional languages . Switching over from or between other languages is more difficult.
Con Single threaded
Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data.
Con Low performance
Electron applications use significantly more CPU, RAM, and disk space than applications written in almost any other framework. This results in poor battery life as well as an unpleasant user experience.
Con Backwards incompatibility between versions
Electron is growing and constantly changing, but there is no care whatsoever whether the changes in a new version will break your application or not. Even if you write and maintain one app, changes to how Electron handles JS files and functions will make maintenance of a single app your full time job. Even the development process, programming mindset and tooling changes between versions, so there is no guarantee that your app will even have a proper architecture a year from when you've built it.
