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UI is incredibly slow just about everywhere. Electron is a good example. The lack of people developing desktop UIs using native toolkits (or libraries with nat

by Cacti 9y ago

UI is incredibly slow just about everywhere. Electron is a good example. The lack of people developing desktop UIs using native toolkits (or libraries with native wrappers) is disturbingly low. It seems everyone is using these cross-platform behemoths that are just slow as hell.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DigitalJack 9y ago
that's because UIs are about the most uninteresting, unfun thing to program. If you have to do it, you sure don't want to do it for more than one platform.
- Cacti 9y ago
  People have been using fast, cross platform toolkits for decades. There is no excuse for slow UI except “we didn’t want to be bothered,” and that has nothing to do with cross platform support, and more to do with not wanting to touch anything that isn’t JavaScript.
- mamcx 9y ago
  That is because the majority of the dev platforms have terrible UIs for making UIs! Imagine how bad things are when people only know the XCode Form builder, get impressed by react/bootstrap builders or think Visual Studio is great on this...
- martin_ky 9y ago
  I beg to differ. I find UI programming (and by extension any kind of graphics programming) interesting and rewarding. I can see the results of my work immediately. The visual confirmation after each code-compile-debug cycle is satisfactory. I believe many UI programmers share this view. Personal taste aside, UIs tend to be slow for different reasons: I think the major reason is the mindset of "oh, it's just UI", thinking that UI is not really 'that' important [part of a bigger system] or that anyone can do it. Not enough attention and expertise then goes to UI. On the other hand, if UI gets enough attention, the effort tends to go to design mostly. You end up with a design department producing beautiful artwork and one poor overworked programmer putting it together. Management tend to overlook the fact, that UI is not just Photoshop or Aftereffects work, but someone needs to actually write the code that uses those pretty graphics assets. This programming part is often misjudged as a trivial step. Don't even get me started on motion design. This whole discipline can be summed up as "how can we use up more CPU/GPU cycles and make things less responsive". Then the market became saturated with UI frameworks built on top of web browsers which by itself is a thick, slow and bloated layer - a far cry from native UI performance. Unfortunately this is becoming the norm due to obvious commercial advantages - it's cross platform and it's easier to hire JS UI programmers. I mean good luck finding a programmer with experience in several native UI kits (say Cocoa, MFC and Android) at once. Even finding someone with adequate experience in one of them is hard enough nowadays. Doing UI properly is expensive.
eat_veggies 9y ago
Building and maintaining three platforms (Mac/Windows/Linux) and maybe four (a web client) or even six (iOS/Android) is expensive as hell, but rigging your web app up to work in electron is cheap and good enough. There's really no incentive to spend 10x the money for high quality native apps anymore, and that's a shame.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
What about cross-platform toolkits like Qt written in C++?

by Cacti 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

DigitalJack 9y ago

that's because UIs are about the most uninteresting, unfun thing to program. If you have to do it, you sure don't want to do it for more than one platform.

Cacti 9y ago
People have been using fast, cross platform toolkits for decades. There is no excuse for slow UI except “we didn’t want to be bothered,” and that has nothing to do with cross platform support, and more to do with not wanting to touch anything that isn’t JavaScript.
mamcx 9y ago
That is because the majority of the dev platforms have terrible UIs for making UIs! Imagine how bad things are when people only know the XCode Form builder, get impressed by react/bootstrap builders or think Visual Studio is great on this...
martin_ky 9y ago
I beg to differ. I find UI programming (and by extension any kind of graphics programming) interesting and rewarding. I can see the results of my work immediately. The visual confirmation after each code-compile-debug cycle is satisfactory. I believe many UI programmers share this view. Personal taste aside, UIs tend to be slow for different reasons: I think the major reason is the mindset of "oh, it's just UI", thinking that UI is not really 'that' important [part of a bigger system] or that anyone can do it. Not enough attention and expertise then goes to UI. On the other hand, if UI gets enough attention, the effort tends to go to design mostly. You end up with a design department producing beautiful artwork and one poor overworked programmer putting it together. Management tend to overlook the fact, that UI is not just Photoshop or Aftereffects work, but someone needs to actually write the code that uses those pretty graphics assets. This programming part is often misjudged as a trivial step. Don't even get me started on motion design. This whole discipline can be summed up as "how can we use up more CPU/GPU cycles and make things less responsive". Then the market became saturated with UI frameworks built on top of web browsers which by itself is a thick, slow and bloated layer - a far cry from native UI performance. Unfortunately this is becoming the norm due to obvious commercial advantages - it's cross platform and it's easier to hire JS UI programmers. I mean good luck finding a programmer with experience in several native UI kits (say Cocoa, MFC and Android) at once. Even finding someone with adequate experience in one of them is hard enough nowadays. Doing UI properly is expensive.

eat_veggies 9y ago

Building and maintaining three platforms (Mac/Windows/Linux) and maybe four (a web client) or even six (iOS/Android) is expensive as hell, but rigging your web app up to work in electron is cheap and good enough. There's really no incentive to spend 10x the money for high quality native apps anymore, and that's a shame.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

What about cross-platform toolkits like Qt written in C++?