3 ms·

There are some good reasons to think it's a good idea. Let's assume you want to escape from the terminal (which seems like a reasonable idea for lots of reason

There are some good reasons to think it's a good idea. Let's assume you want to escape from the terminal (which seems like a reasonable idea for lots of reasons -- pictures, icons, variable-sized fonts among others). So, let's assume you don't want to have to implement text / picture rendering yourself from scratch in a multi-OS manner. Where can you get code that has spent years working on the highest performance, dynamic text and picture rendering? Web browsers!

shakna 10y ago
Wx, Qt, Tk all also fall into that boundary.
- msbarnett 10y ago
  Something like Qt wouldn't help much. Even if you provided a scripting bridge so that extension authors could distribute one plugin for all platforms, the extension model is wrong -- if I have to subclass a Qt component to extend it, then my extensions don't compose with everyone else's. You'd need to use Qt to build an extension framework that exposes document contents in a way that all extensions can customize their display simultaneously -- and at this point you're just creating an ad-hoc, less well-understood DOM.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > You'd need to use Qt to build an extension framework that exposes document contents in a way that all extensions can customize their display simultaneously -- and at this point you're just creating an ad-hoc, less well-understood DOM. QtQuick with QML and their scripting engine? It has a full DOM, scriptability, and extensibility.
    - msbarnett 10y ago
      Sure, you could do that. You're using a less well known DOM, which will probably discourage extension authorship somewhat. AFAIK Qt's "v4" is a v8 fork, so scripting performance is probably a wash. It's hard to imagine that the DOM renderer in QML is really much better performing than Webkit, and anyway it's not really DOM rendering that's the slow part in Atom -- VS Code proves that. I don't know what you'd really hope to gain from this, in other words. "Atom is more-or-less just as slow but has a less well known DOM" doesn't strike me as a compelling engineering decision.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Whatever happened to Java? It was the "write once, run anywhere" language fifteen years ago. Dynamic class loading makes writing extensions pretty easy as well.
  - shakna 10y ago
    Damn, how could I forget Swing? Its such a breeze to use!

shakna 10y ago

Wx, Qt, Tk all also fall into that boundary.

msbarnett 10y ago
Something like Qt wouldn't help much. Even if you provided a scripting bridge so that extension authors could distribute one plugin for all platforms, the extension model is wrong -- if I have to subclass a Qt component to extend it, then my extensions don't compose with everyone else's. You'd need to use Qt to build an extension framework that exposes document contents in a way that all extensions can customize their display simultaneously -- and at this point you're just creating an ad-hoc, less well-understood DOM.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > You'd need to use Qt to build an extension framework that exposes document contents in a way that all extensions can customize their display simultaneously -- and at this point you're just creating an ad-hoc, less well-understood DOM. QtQuick with QML and their scripting engine? It has a full DOM, scriptability, and extensibility.
  - msbarnett 10y ago
    Sure, you could do that. You're using a less well known DOM, which will probably discourage extension authorship somewhat. AFAIK Qt's "v4" is a v8 fork, so scripting performance is probably a wash. It's hard to imagine that the DOM renderer in QML is really much better performing than Webkit, and anyway it's not really DOM rendering that's the slow part in Atom -- VS Code proves that. I don't know what you'd really hope to gain from this, in other words. "Atom is more-or-less just as slow but has a less well known DOM" doesn't strike me as a compelling engineering decision.
adrianN 10y ago
Whatever happened to Java? It was the "write once, run anywhere" language fifteen years ago. Dynamic class loading makes writing extensions pretty easy as well.
- shakna 10y ago
  Damn, how could I forget Swing? Its such a breeze to use!