[n8cpdx]

It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option).

But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.

I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?

FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.

[pipeline_peak]

What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?

[n8cpdx]

My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.

[jshier]

Yeah, it's not bloated, there are just a lot of surprising and weird performance holes, especially on macOS. Even on iOS there's dumb things like, if your List cell's outer view isn't a specific type, List won't optimize for cell reuse, and it will start dequeuing cells for every item in the List eagerly. Wrap your actual cell type with a VStack or something and it will work properly, only dequeuing visible cells. It can be really nice to work with, but man, some of the implicit behavior, performance other otherwise, is shocking.

[aaronsung]

I do not think the current computers can catch up with Electron. When it is just one or two simple app it is ok, but when everything is built with Electron (which is happening now) then it is not enough even with 32gb+ ram.