Discussion: Excessive use of remote / ipc

The sentry/electron module appears to send an ipc message for every single console log that occurs in every browser window, as well as other browser window events.

The core electron team has been advising against the use of remote for a while, and recently formalized this advice: https://medium.com/@nornagon/electrons-remote-module-considered-harmful-70d69500f31

I’d consider the amount of remote/ipc messages that the sentry module ends up introducing as problematic as Electron is already a slower environment than Chromium. Perhaps it would be worth thinking about a batching strategy?

[timfish]

The single usage of remote in sentry-electron is here. It’s used to get the application name which is used by electron native crash reporter to name the crashes directory.

I think the best way allow usage without remote but keep the convenience of the current setup would be to add an optional appName property to ElectronOptions. If the user supplies this property, sentry-electron will use it and if none is supplied, it’ll fallback to remote.app.name/getName(). If it reaches the fallback and remote is not available, there will be an error with a pointer to ElectronOptions.appName. I’ll post a PR in a moment.

[koenoe]

Using IPC is fine, but using the remote module is not recommended by Electron as mentioned before. Right now I’ve managed to get rid of using the remote module in our app, but still can’t fully disable it as Sentry relies on it. Are there any plans of fixing this?