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by adhesive_wombat 932 days ago
Anything to satisfy whichever law it is that says "lagginess remains constant".
1 comments

"Huh, this CPU is kind of snappy running native code now. What should we do?"

"Let's move application development to Python then, I suppose."

"Thanks, that fixed it."

Probably what happened in my 55" smart TV dev team.

I would bet that instead of python it's JavaScript and a webapp pretending to be a native application.
If it's an LG TV this is literally true. They bought webOS specifically for this purpose. Meanwhile Roku invented a runtime/language (BrightScript) and mandated its use to at least enforce a minimum quality standard and throw away cruft.
WebOS supports Qt as well.
Definitely happened on the OLPC.

What's worse, they made a "throbber" effect by string substituting a different color into an SVG, and then reparsing the SVG, for each color it fades through.

That's the kind of coding quality the OLPC project had. That's why it failed, and it probably also factored into why they disabled the view source button.

In modern GTK you also have to string-substitute or otherwise construct CSS, pass in as a string and have it reparsed to change element styles. But at least it is native!
It also failed because it took ages to release anything useful. It took years, and suddenly smartphones were upon us all, and OLPC shrunk from a special niche to a tiny niche.