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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

This is really intended for development work on complex codebases with long running build/test times.

Developing and running builds on a powerful remote system in a data center from your laptop is a game changer, as long as you have a good connection and low latency.

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What kind of workload favors the cloud over a powerful laptop, let alone a desktop machine? Surely the security is the only real advantage.

code close to data is the real one; managed services for companies that fire a lot of devs is a cynical one; always-on security updates probably big too.

(at school they call me a "box hugger")

Anytime that your bandwidth is low and you need to work with data hosted on your cloud provider or even pulling down Docker containers.

I can also provision VMs that are much more powerful than any reasonable desktop temporarily.

But most developers don’t use desktops any more do they? Even if you’re hybrid and were forced to return to office, you would still want a laptop.

If your bandwidth is that low, how would this remote desktop experience feel good? It won't.

I’ve done a Remote Desktop equivalent over a modem with PCAnywhere in late 90s. Even VNC which is horribly inefficient compared to better protocols is good enough.

A laptop or desktop machine is only one machine. It might have multiple cores and gobs of RAM but at its heart it's still one machine with all the limitations that brings. Working on the cloud with a big build cluster means when you hit compile it spawns a ton more jobs than a single machine ever could run, and then the binary gets delivered and runs in the right dev environment with all the decencies set up for you already. After running a fleet of automated testing on top of that.

I suppose if you have some kind of compilation that can saturate 100+ cores for so long it makes sense to send out the work to other machines then this could be useful. One machine is an advantage when we're thinking about the I/O overhead. I suppose giant Infinibuild projects exist so there's a market for some C++ devs perhaps. It still seems fairly niche to me.

The aggressively parallel automated testing is nice but I don't see why that requires the IDE in the cloud.

Server cpus have way more cache and faster ram than laptops of the same generation. Also, people here usually mean ‘MacBook pro’ when they say ‘laptop’, and macOS is amazingly bad at docker when compared with native Linux, which is what you’ll likely be running on the remote workstation.

Low latency definitely makes for a better experience, but since it's javascript running the browser, I assume typing into the editor textarea and most features will go as fast as javascript will go.

Do you type faster than what javascript is able to handle?

Depends on how much JS is trying to handle.

I think you’re forgetting that javascript in this context needs to be constantly re-evaluating the whole document; It must do this for syntax highlighting alone, not to mention other plugins, spell checkers and auto-completes

but since most editors are also just electron apps, it's not much of a difference

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