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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Yeah.... maybe. I think AI is still too prone to go down rabbit holes and not understand the whole picture well enough to come up with good optimisations. It's probably good at micro-optimisation, e.g. pre-allocating arrays. But is it going to realise that you don't need that array in the first place? I dunno.

On the other hand it does mean there's no excuse for writing your program using Python or Electron or whatever, which will have a big effect on performance.

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The reason for using Electron is to write once and run everywhere right?

I get that LLMs would make it faster to write distinct copies for different operating systems and maintain them both but thats still more costly than a single system.

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the goal of Electron but it still seems cheaper and easier (although admittedly worse than multiple native apps)

Yeah that's my point. Maybe AI will lower that cost to the point where it makes sense to write e.g. a native Slack app. I dunno, we'll see.

There is a native Slack client actually. Fast and with good feature coverage, it’s called msga.app

Aha exactly what I was talking about. Vibe coded in a few months. Maybe it has slop bugs but if you have as many employees as Slack it shouldn't be that hard to whip into shape. There's no excuse for Slack not having done this themselves.

Are you suggesting Electron is slow? What evidence do you have? There may be a +200ms start up time compared to a native application; is that so bad?

Besides a bootup that is no longer than your browser's, everything else inside an Electron app can be identically fast to a native application.

Please be a better filter - do not spread bad memes.

> everything else inside an Electron app can be identically fast to a native application.

HTML layout and rendering is almost never as fast as GUIs like Qt. Also Electron apps usually use JavaScript which is slower than "fast" languages like C++/Rust/Kotlin/etc.

The reason people use Electron is because it's easy, especially if you have to have a website anyway. Slack is a great example of this. They already have a full website so it's kind of silly to redo the whole thing...

Unless AI makes it easy. We'll see I guess.

You are right about "almost never as fast as", but it is imperceptible to any human. We're talking about less than 100ms to render basically any typical UI, which then updates faster than 30fs. I said "identically fast"; I should have said "with respect to human perception".

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