Comment by developer2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by developer2 | Hacker News Reader

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Aside from the specific optimizations listed in the article, and caring about improving round-trip times for remote API calls in general, the fact is that any app built properly with native MacOS/iOS APIs will be extremely fast.

Apple's APIs for macOS and iOS are simply better than those provided by either Microsoft (for Windows), Google (for Android), etc. Apple's APIs are, for the most part, very well-thought-out; their engineers have put together fantastic layers in the operating system and its UI components. The primary reason so many apps perform poorly on Apple platforms is because those apps were developed using 3rd party cross-platform tools (eg. Electron, or making an iOS app with webviews rather than native elements).

Developers who make efficient use of Apple's APIs, and who spend time to reduce their backend response time on remote API calls, will always produce an amazing product. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Apollo app for Reddit on iOS; it is coded with 100% native platform APIs, with no slow cross-platform garbage. It's such a breath of fresh air to witness.

> the fact is that any app built properly with native MacOS/iOS APIs will be extremely fast

Nope, you’re reaching too far. Applications built using native frameworks will have a strong push to generally do it right, but nobody can save you from an O(n^2) loop. And even with native frameworks and engineers with access to the best resources, you can totally mess up: take macOS Catalina’s Activity Monitor app, which takes up approximately half a core updating a table view every second, which it managed to do previously with a mere fraction of the resource usage. You can’t fix everything.

> The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Apollo app for Reddit on iOS; it is coded with 100% native platform APIs, with no slow cross-platform garbage.

Apollo is not cross-platform, but it doesn’t always use native platform widgets as I have pointed out to Christian in the past. I don’t think this has had a major performance impact, especially since they aren’t in the most computationally expensive path, but those parts probably do not interact with the platform at the layer you think they do.

1. I did not mention Apple's own native apps as a perfect example. I have also noticed Activity Monitor as an imperfect sample. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the APIs available, or if Apple engineers just fucked up. I 100% agree that Activity Monitor takes up far more resources than it should. Then again, monitoring every single process (plus thousands of threads!) running on an operating system is an intensive undertaking, so I'm not entirely sure who to blame, if anyone.

2. I will 100% defend Christian until the end of days. I respect the fact you at least know his name, assuming that you can in return understand that everything he does is amazing. Yes, some of what he does directly counteracts the weaknesses that are innate to the Apple platform (which should be called out against Apple). His most recent release, for example, offers a "Smart Rotation Lock", which swaps between portrait and landscape depending on whether a GIF or video is playing; something Apple should have built in from day one. Also, he had a volume bar in top-left corner on iPhone X and beyond before Apple even made that standard. IMO everything he does to break the "Apple philosophy" winds up getting adopted by Apple. Christian is that good.

3. Everything I said above, whether already existing at Apple or pushed towards the future, is already better than Windows or Linux. MacOS and iOS are positioned to take over the future of computing, minus one mother-fucking aspect (fuck you, Apple): gaming. Even if Metal is technically superior, vendor-lock at Apple makes Metal worthless vs. DirectX and OpenGL. This is the only thing I am willing to abdicate… Apple+MacOS+iOS needs to figure out how to play nice with cross-platform gaming.

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