What do you mean, #electron has no compile target for #freebsd. At that point Im convinced theres no point to use Electron for desktop apps.
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@mpts@mastodon.social I know that theres a port but its a bit tedious because I just tried to build an app based on nodejs which uses electron. Its not important enough for me to spend much more time on that, was just curious if I could easily build it.
The problem upstream is that Electron is basically a wrapper around Chromium and Node.js. Node.js is a wrapper around v8, but the most complexity in the entire stack is in Blink and v8. v8 is pretty portable and supports FreeBSD but the first thing that Google did when they forked WebKit for blink was to rip out a load of platform abstractions. They refuse to take any patches to support platforms that Google does not ship Chrome for, because it increases their maintenance burden for no commercial benefit.
This means that the FreeBSD Electron port has to maintain downstream patches to make Chromium run on FreeBSD, and then the additional bits for Electron. The latter are quite easy, but the former is painful (the work is shared with the FreeBSD Chromium port, but it’s still a huge amount of work, made much harder by explicit policies of the Google Chrome team).