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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Trying to build full-on real applications with hypertext and its macros has never been a good idea in the first place. It keeps surprising me that companies that have all resources to build proper, native, efficient first-class desktop apps, opt for what is effectively a very advanced word processor instead. Some also insist that it's the only way of building desktop apps now.

This world desperately needs a modern native multi-protocol desktop IM client. By "desktop", I mean using fully native controls (appkit/win32/gtk, yes, three separate GUI implementations), taking advantage of multiple windows, and ignoring the existence of touchscreens. I may build one in the future.

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MS teams is the only electron app on my computer that feels slow. Microsoft has done an almost uniquely bad job.

Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back. Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

> Native desktop apps probably aren’t coming back.

They are if I build one.

> Typescript is a vastly better language than C++ and Python which the current gui frameworks support.

No, TypeScript is a marginal improvement over JavaScript. It doesn't change the fact that JS with its ecosystem is a dumpster fire because it's unfixably flawed in way too many ways.

There are many languages capable of calling C/C++ functions. I'm a Java kind of person, so I'm waiting for the proper FFI (java.foreign) to be released. Yes, I know about JNA, I use it in one project, but I don't like it. But in the end you can really write a "native" app in anything that's capable of putting the right values into the right registers and jumping to the right address. As far as the user is concerned, the nativeness comes from the GUI toolkit the app uses and the app's responsiveness.

p.s. nice username

Mind if I ask what OS you're on? On macos I use teams a lot and it is very fast even when resources are tight yet you're not the first person I heard say it is slow.

Not the parent, but I use teams in macOS. I wouldn’t call it fast, but I also haven’t experienced the kind of horrible performance other people apparently have.

Video playback and taking calls on a second, larger (40” 4k) display, have improved slightly but are still bad enough that I’d rather move the app to the laptop’s display (32gb mbp mid-2020)

I do think it’s a second-rate app compared to most of Microsoft’s usual offerings - OneNote being a notable exception. Other than the video item above, I’ve found overall performance to be adequate and not remarkable one way or the other.

It's super slow on windows, but VSCode has become very slow, too.

My point exactly. It's not like MS lacks desktop programming languages for its own products/OSes.

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