[crubier]

Apple charges $200 for 8GB additional RAM. So the cost of 600MB of Apple RAM in $15. That's the cost of 1 month of a subscription to Slack. You're likely to use your laptop for ~4years = 50months, so the RAM cost of Slack is around 2% of overall Slack cost, even on Apple hardware.

Users pay 2% more to get more RAM, Slack developers have 200% productivity thanks to not having to deal with low-level optimization crap, and can focus on building features and UX.

That's how the world works. But some angry HNers can't wrap their heads around it

[modo_mario]

The thing is that slack developers are not the only ones that think that way. So now people lose some percentage to their mail client, their chat client, their ide,... A bit more ram for developer comfort, a bit more processing power, a bit more to download,...

Additionally at the end of the day some people do interact with non developers and realize they tend to have less beefy devices. Being the tech support in the family can be interesting because of that front. For example when I'm asked what's causing my fathers or grandparents relatively new laptop to be so laggy despite how much better it is than the predecessor and finding out there's no happy answer for that. There's no explaining that some software regressed on this front and they should just accept more electronic waste.

[ohgodplsno]

No, the cost of 600MB of RAM is $200. You just end up having bonus to waste on more electron apps.

This whole "this is how the world works" bullshit is post-hoc rationalisation done by wealthy idiots trying to justify their purchase by saying "it's just 5 cents a day if you consider it'll last ten years". This is bullshit and only applies if the purchase you're making is insignificant to you. So, congrats, $200 is insignificant to you. It's not, for most of the world, but you'd see that if you pulled your head out your ass.

This isn't even "not having to deal with low level optimization". Using a normal toolkit is not low level optimization, it's the bare minimum.

Putain, elle est belle la French Tech avec des gens comme ça.

[crubier]

Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts.

Clearly, companies and developers are behaving in a way you don't like. You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots.

I'm explaining to you the correct way to explain this behavior, an explanation that does not assume that a majority of successful companies and people are stupid, but that instead relies on rational arguments.

Of course I'd love it if there was a perfect way to develop software once without micromanaging memory, run it on web, desktop, mobile and have it be super performant at the same time. It just does not exist as of today, companies and people take rational decisions based on this. It is how it is, stop raging, accept it or build something better.

[ohgodplsno]

>Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts.

No, you're stating an opinion and trying to pass it off as facts.

>You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots.

If you work with developers, you know we're all idiots at heart. And lol absolutely yes billion dollar companies are stupid. You think that scale prevents stupidity ? No, if anything it scales it up even harder. A company that was doing stupid things as a self funded startup with 5k in the bank and a multinational megacorporation with 50 billion in the bank both have equal opportunities to be stupid. The billion dollar corporation even gets to use it's sheer scale to walk over their stupidity and not die from it.

> stop raging,

The day I'll stop complaining will be a miserable one. Stopping the rage is what lead to absolutely dreadful state of software development today.

>an explanation that does not assume that a majority of successful companies and people are stupid, but that instead relies on rational arguments.

One does not preclude the other, the rational argument is still a moronic one.

>Of course I'd love it if there was a perfect way to develop software once without micromanaging memory, run it on web, desktop, mobile and have it be super performant at the same time.

Have you _never_ looked at any UI toolkit in existence, ever ? Even Flutter is a better option than Electron if all you want is a multiplatform app, and this is coming from someone not necessarily holding Flutter in his heart. The bare minimum to do if you're going to make your life easier is to not pick the absolute worst option that is Electron. There's a scale to multiplatform toolkits, and Electron is at the bottom end of this, being neither a good technical choice, a good product choice, a good choice for your users. Electron benefits a single group: developers, but mostly company management, happy to crap out software.

[crubier]

> Have you _never_ looked at any UI toolkit in existence, ever ?

Funny that you say that, I actually did my PhD on this topic! You can find a state of the art of UI toolkits, from page 28 to page 96 of my PhD manuscript. https://hal.science/tel-01455466 I wrote it in 2015, so it's dated for sure. But short answer is: Yes I have been looking at A LOT of UI Toolkits, and one thing I am sure of is that you clearly are blissfully unaware of the socio-technical aspects of Toolkit adoption.

[jabradoodle]

Flutter isn't a great example, slack predates it by years.

[crubier]

Even if Flutter existed, it would absolutely not have been an obviously smart move by Slack to DOUBLE their engineering workload by picking it instead of Electron while still having to develop a web based version. For what result? The app would most likely not be noticeably faster, if anything, just because the engineering effort that went into optimizing Slack performance would have been dilapidated in re-implementing and maintaining Slack in another toolkit.

[radicalbyte]

I was making a joke :-)

As an industry we trade runtime efficiency for lowering the bar on developers; we've been doing that for 40 years now. The industry has been growing so hard that that is a unavoidable and at a macro level probably a net positive.