Create smaller sized apps with React

You may not be surprised that some developers have criticised Electron (see tutorials LXF256), mostly regarding the memory usage of its final binaries. The initial binary is over 100MB, because a major chunk of code from Chrome is embedded. When you create a small piece of code, this is a horrible waste. With Proton Native the binary is compiled with the bare essentials, making the binary a few kilobytes in size. That’s a very big win for small utilities.

Until now Proton Native hasn’t been in much use with bigger projects. However, it may become popular thanks to the potential for more efficient and smaller binaries compared to Electron. Since it supports Node.js, developers can create pretty much everything that they can with Electron.

Environment and compilers

Under the bonnet, Proton Native uses libgtk3-dev, build-essential, python2 and pkg-config for its compiling, so make sure they are installed.

Now you can compile the package you are about to make. This is a Node.js package that you can install using or . At the time of