Comment by iaml | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iaml | Hacker News Reader

> I also don’t think that shoehorning web development technologies—which technically don’t provide any advantages over more traditional approaches—into desktop applications is a very sound idea either.

So, isn't sidestepping all of the problems author had with other technologies not an advantage enough? Not only that, using html/css for layout allows for easily created and very flexible responsive layouts which half of the other toolkits can't do at all out-of-the-box. Author seemingly swept this approach under the rug without ever seriously considering it ("I don’t have any personal experience using Light Table", "so developers can use hipster technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript", etc), and I can kind of see why he thinks that. But as a frequent user of such applications, I'm willing to take a slight performance hit if that allows me to use the same app on any platform, even if it's size becomes 200 megabytes bigger. Honestly, I'm a bit baffled why people are bothered so much by those 200 MB, it's not a burden to download it, it doesn't take much space on my ssd, or my RAM for that matter.

>I'm willing to take a slight performance hit if that allows me to use the same app on any platform, even if it's size becomes 200 megabytes bigger.

From personal exeprience, it's beyond slight perf hit. Often js apps are the ones hogging most of the resources on my system.

I don't think it's possible to emphasise this enough.

Slack and Spotify are consistently the worst-performing applications I use frequently, easily by an order of magnitude. Slack manages to absolutely tear through CPU cycles and battery life, while simultaneously being sluggish and shitty to use. Have you ever tried scrolling back in a channel? It's horrifying.

It's got bad enough that I've started to hack together native Mac clients for both in my spare time.

That 200M is nothing to you does not make it nothing to everyone. Some of us are working on Raspberry Pi or equivalent hardware, and every MB and Mhz counts.

I doubt amount of such users is substantial. I assume we are talking about business decisions here, and as far as those go ditching 0.1% of userbase to radically simplify development process and architecture is a pretty simple one.

> I doubt amount of such users is substantial

"So screw them. We don't care about their concerns."

This is not a solution. Sure, the majority of users don't care about the performance hit, or size requirement, but solving that problem in a way substantial enough to make those with tighter requirements happy can only help everyone.

I have an 8-core 4ghz CPU, 2 >5tflops GPUs and am not content with the performance of web-based GUI. It's sluggish and bloated. No matter how powerful my system is, I can tell, and it's enough of an issue to warrant complaint.

Problem is, as author stated there is no such solution right now. It's all about trade offs and in any case you got to sacrifice something. Sure, solving this problem would be amazing and good for all but I know I'm not up to task and there are tons of other people much smarter than me who tried and failed already. I don't think electron is the problem, I just think there are some quirks with it that were not yet ironed out.

> I don't think electron is the problem, I just think there are some quirks with it that were not yet ironed out.

The problem with electron is not that it has quirks, but that it is chromium "ironed out" to be a GUI toolkit. It's effective, and generally well done, considering that fact, but will continue to be noticeably sluggish as long as it even resembles what it was in the first place.

I've built a number of interfaces for applications running on Raspberry Pis using Electron, and it's been great. Space or performance hasn't been an issue. The kiosk mode in Electron is perfect.

The use of "hipster" as a pejorative doesn't even make sense to me here. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are hipster technologies? They aren't new by any stretch.

Using this term seems like lazy authorship and thinking. Instead of explaining, just call it hipster and assume it's obvious.

Like you said, cross-platform support is the opposite of unimportant. The appeal of the web has a lot to do with the fact that a browser on any platform can (mostly) have the same experience without (too much) extra work. It may not be appropriate for Light Table, but a general hipster-like dismissal of web tech doesn't advance the argument.

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