[mherkender]

Algorithms and data structures aren't the problem, bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.

I think Rust's rise in popularity will probably lead to some benefits.

Games will probably get more efficient but they're easier to scale down to the memory that's available.

[xp84]

> bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.

Precisely. And all that extra resource wastage is completely free! (paid by your customers).

Perhaps if there were any big software companies who were so iconoclastic as to write fast software and avoid wasteful patterns like using Electron, pressure to do better could be felt, but every company that ships software[1] behaves the same so if anyone tries out competition due to performance beefs, they'll have no relief. They'll be forced to blame their hardware and upgrade it.

[1] Only exception of course is some indie developers. I don't know of any companies that have more than about 2 devs who haven't adopted the 'modern' approach, where we only fix performance issues that completely block using the app.

[mike_hearn]

You're forgetting about Apple and that entire ecosystem.

Android, too. Not much Electron to be found there. Both Android and iOS were heavily optimized for low memory environments back at the start.

[xp84]

First-party and lovingly-crafted indie apps do use native technologies, and often care about performance, but it feels like everything else uses various bloated cross-platform frameworks.

The fact that nothing on my modern day iPhone feels any faster than my iPhone 4 did, when the current phones are 10x more powerful tells me that developers consistently spend >= 100% of the yearly Moore's Law dividend on framework bloat, spyware, and useless animations. If we could run iOS 6 and its matching apps on modern hardware, and set animation duration to 0 like jailbreaks used to allow, imagine how fast our phones would be!

[pjmlp]

Unfortunately shipping a Webview is also common trend in Rust applications.