Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by creativecupcak3 2225 days ago
I will try my best to be nice about this. But what the HECK are you talking about? Yes, of course there is. There will always be.

Electron(or whatever web-based nonsense somebody comes up with six months from now):we've optimized your insane garbage collectors. We've optimized your GPU insane modules. We've optimized data structures to get a 10X performance increase. We've cut down memory usage by half, which still rounds down to AT LEAST 100MB in most cases. Look at me now...

Desktop/Native:Good for you! But did you know my code runs on bare metal? The only thing stopping it is cache misses and dirty TLB entries. Sometimes I can use registers, but there's just a few of them. And, well, stupid RAM sometimes takes over 100 nanoseconds.

Web:What in the world is cache? TLB? Are you on something right now? What is a nanosecond?????

Web cannot perceive what a nanosecond is

Native:There, there. You'll figure it out one day.

I don't want to come off as snarky, but this feels like a dumb question. And yes, I know, from a "business" perspective writing the code "once" and have run everywhere makes more sense. But let's be real, one of the main reasons a lot of these tech companies like Discord/Slack is jumping on the Electron wagon is money. It's cheaper to have one team of developers, than 3 for each platform. But even that argument feels a little weird to me when stuff like Qt that is 100X more mature than Electron will ever be exists. And before anyone asks, as long as you open source your app, Qt is completely free.

I do think that in SOME cases an Electron app MIGHT make sense. But cluttering native platforms with all this bloat is like riding a horse to work on your 40 mile commute instead of your Honda. Even that's a horrible analogy because your Honda is terrible for the Earth. But hopefully you get my point.

This lack of concern for computational resources by us programmers is utterly discouraging. As has been mentioned before in this thread, people that do ACTUAL work on computers will not take the bloated nonsense. Go ask the struggling artist if they prefer to use Krita or the new "modern" app that takes 600MB of RAM and the entire system gets bugged down to the point where they can't do research on their browser while drawing because Windows10/macOS plus the "modern" app takes 90% of their RAM because they have a 4GB/6GB computer.

Well shit, I guess I need a 1500 dollar computer to just draw a few sketches. I already have crippling debt, what's some more debt under my belt gonna do?