Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dragonwriter

> It truly is heresy to not fully utilize the hardware we create,

Violation of irrational dogma? Certainly is.

> simply because people don't optimize at every step of the process

Sure they do.

Processor efficiency isn't always the target of optimization, often for very good reasons.

> In game engines they do, to some extent, because they have to,

Yes, because optimizing market value to production cost in that market requires optimizing use of hardware.

In lots of other markets it doesn't, and optimizing use of hardware would be an taking on a cost that isn't warranted by delivered value.

View on HN

Sure, but the pendulum has swung so far in the "I optimize for dev time not server time" that people are forgetting how to write fast, efficient programs, and we the end users have to put up with that garbage like Electron.

Electron afaik wasn't created because "people forgot" but because it's by far the easiest way to create a platform independent UI that's heavily customisable.

There is this meme that Electron is so bad but as an end user I have much better experiences with Electron apps like Slack and Discord then I do with Microsoft Teams or other competitor apps that don’t use Electron.

Is Microsoft Teams supposed to be the fast, efficient alternative because I don’t think so...

Teams also uses Electron FYI.

Haha guess it wasn’t such a good example then, I had no idea. But I do think Slack or Discord works as well as native Mac apps from the user perspective. I can’t really tell the difference between Atom and say the old Sublime Text or Textmate. If you told me they were all Electron I’d believe you other than Textmate being so old that it couldn’t have been when I used it

Teams is also an Electron app.

Oh I had no idea, thanks

The problem with Teams is that Teams doesn't have to sell based on user experience. Its sales pitch is "you already paid for an Exchange server or Office 365, so this is ready to go".

Web site bloat is largely due to web applications being optimised for product managers. Tracking, ad partners, etc...aren’t there for the developers benefit any more than they’re there for the end user.

Sure, there is bloat in a great many web frame works and I too question why some blogs need JS enabled just to render static text. But if we are being honest, by far the worst offenders for web bloat is the trackers and ad partners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com