HTML/CSS/script based IDE in 2mb | Hacker News Reader

script based IDE in 2mb

sciter.com

2 pointsc-smile6 comments

If you really want to optimize download size, you could go a step further and use each platform's native rendering engine. So, MSHTMl for Windows (the desktop platform, not WinRT/UWP which nobody actually uses for anything serious), and WebKit for Mac and Linux.

You've said before that some Windows antivirus programs use Sciter. I wonder why they didn't opt for MSHTML instead. Is COM/ActiveX that repulsive? Or is it because Sciter gives them a consistent feature set regardless of the version of WIndows and IE that the user has installed?

(I am an author of Sciter)

I am comparing distribution sizes of would-be-sciter-based-IDE with Brackets/Adobe, Visual Code / Microsoft and Atom / GitHub.

Common for all them: they use HTML/CSS/script based UI.

Sciter's IDE uses Sciter Engine as it is.

Others in the set are Chrome/Node.js based. So they appear as include JavaScript runtime twice - the one in Chrome and the one in Node. But conceptually you just need JS once.

Sciter has a built-in option to style arbitrary text runs so syntax highligting does not require DOM change and so it can be done directly in standard <textarea> editor. Yet Sciter exposes existing HTML/CSS/script tokenizers to the script. That again makes highligting as fast as possible yet code reuse of the whole thing.

Most of us don't care much about executable or distribution size. Bandwidth and storage are incredibly cheap. My time isn't. If an IDE has the features I need, I don't mind an extra 100 MB.

The comparisons made here are based on priorities that almost no one has anymore. VS Code is a great IDE -- I've never thought about its size.

Let's see some feature comparisons instead.

Agree of course. But if you have small distribution size and feature set you need - the better.

Yet: I've been told once by UI/UX director of one of 100-top software companies that he has 40 seconds for the user to decide will he/she use the app or not. That includes also download time. They did special investigation of this.

I would bet a lot of money that it's more than 40 seconds when the app is a professional tool and the target audience is software developers.

It takes 2 minutes on broadband connection to get Atom for example. But these minutes/seconds are nothing of course in case of IDEs, I agree as I said.

All that just does not look right. Two JS instances while you can do the same in just one. A lot of code in script that is doubling functionality that is already there. So it is not just about size but effectiveness of the whole solution.

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