[nananana9]

The classic excuse for industry-wide incompetence. The average programmer today can't write good code even if told it's an explicit priority.

The manager wants the Submit button to submit the form, they rarely care how the programmer does it. It's the programmer that chose to install the 11,000 node_modules, to use React with 3 layers of state management on top with hybrid SSR/CSR and to do Kubernetes because that's what was on Hacker News that day or whatever. And guess what, somehow the Submit button does still not submit the form 10% of the time.

Get rid of the junk and the program will be more efficient AND you'll ship quicker.

[mike_hearn]

How much "junk" do you want to get rid of?

I suspect you're imagining something like, just write some vanilla JS and maybe some tasteful but not bloated CSS.

You could do that. Then I'll come along with my old man Win32 skills and write a form with a submit button that sends the data by doing a memcpy into a UDP packet. It will take 300 kilobytes of RAM and start in 0.1 seconds. That'll make it approx 100x more RAM efficient than the baseline you can manage with Chrome, where an empty renderer process takes 23 MB of RAM to achieve nothing and starts so slowly the browser has to cache them in the background.

On the other hand, delivering features your users expect might be a bit harder. Shipping and updating that app will be painful for me, unless I use [plug] https://hydraulic.dev/ to make it easy [/plug], and the styling options are limited to setting solid color backgrounds on things. Things the product manager views as basic, like adding a dark mode, will take a surprising amount of effort. The app is likely to be more crash prone than the web app due to all the manual memory management required. Text zoom won't work. I'll have to write in C or maybe C++ if I'm feeling extravagent.

So there's got to be a balance somewhere. Features do matter.

[mwcampbell]

Rust with wxWidgets via wxDragon has recently become a viable option for some kinds of apps. It even has dark mode now. wxWidgets comes with a disappointing amount of bloat though.

[znpy]

> The average programmer today can't write good code even if told it's an explicit priority.

But what even is good code?

As an infrastructure guy i see my fellow software engineers endlessly debating and bikeshedding on anything but speed and memory consumption.

I see them arguing about functional vs object oriented, immutable data structures, test driven development, agentic bs, this or that interpreted language… never about reducing memory consumption .

[lpapez]

What is "good code"?

If you ask your boss, it will most likely be whatever spaghetti code which ensures the contract gets signed on time.

The boss doesn't care if the developer needs 10000 libraries for the submit button.

[fsloth]

"The boss" is not who says what is good enough. Ultimately it's the customer. In many industries it seems good enough is not very good.

Then there are industries where the customer complains if code is slow. They will actually hire expensive consultants to analyze and benchmark the code. And while the consultants likely are not more talented than inhouse staff, now you have both sides very interested at looking at the problem from engineering perspective.

In this case "good" includes performance.