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Mostly good article, but I don't appreciate the gratuitous dunking on web devs towards the bottom: "so developers can use hipster technologies like HTML, CSS a

by _bxg1 8y ago

Mostly good article, but I don't appreciate the gratuitous dunking on web devs towards the bottom: "so developers can use hipster technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript" "the vast armies of newskool web developers who grew up on JavaScript and the DOM" ...especially when the author doesn't really appear to know what he's talking about in that space: "And when things don’t quite work as expected, you can’t do much about it—short of maybe just switching to a different framework as a last attempt." "and long-term maintenance will be a nightmare." "web development technologies—which technically don’t provide any advantages over more traditional approaches" There are legitimate criticisms of Electron as a choice for desktop apps, but that doesn't invalidate an entire domain's worth of developers.

_bxg1 8y ago
In reality, JavaScript in 2019 on V8 - thanks to innovations like JIT compiling - is in almost the same ballpark as Java itself when it comes to performance. JavaScript itself is not what slows down JavaScript UIs. What does slow down Web UIs is the DOM (whose rendering engine in Chromium is written in C++). The DOM is the most advanced layout engine ever created. It does an unbelievable amount of work to make interfaces resizable-by-default and adaptable-by-default, and yet is enormously flexible, allowing one to build virtually any box-based interface imaginable. This isn't simply so newcomers have an easier time. It frees application code to focus on the control logic and the structural side of the view, instead of messing with things like pixels and manual sizing, which makes application code more maintainable and reusable. I can place a piece of DOM in wildly different contexts, with wildly different amounts and types of content, and for the most part it will just respond as expected. This significantly reduces code complexity, which improves long-term maintainability and avoids bugs. This of course comes with a cost. All of those implicit layout adjustments have overhead. The ability for your code to handle content you never thought it would encounter requires CPU time. That cost isn't worth it for certain applications. But it isn't a waste, or a sign of the moral decline of "kids these days". It's a conscious tradeoff that any good developer can weigh and consider for what it is.

by _bxg1 8y ago

_bxg1 8y ago

In reality, JavaScript in 2019 on V8 - thanks to innovations like JIT compiling - is in almost the same ballpark as Java itself when it comes to performance. JavaScript itself is not what slows down JavaScript UIs. What does slow down Web UIs is the DOM (whose rendering engine in Chromium is written in C++). The DOM is the most advanced layout engine ever created. It does an unbelievable amount of work to make interfaces resizable-by-default and adaptable-by-default, and yet is enormously flexible, allowing one to build virtually any box-based interface imaginable. This isn't simply so newcomers have an easier time. It frees application code to focus on the control logic and the structural side of the view, instead of messing with things like pixels and manual sizing, which makes application code more maintainable and reusable. I can place a piece of DOM in wildly different contexts, with wildly different amounts and types of content, and for the most part it will just respond as expected. This significantly reduces code complexity, which improves long-term maintainability and avoids bugs. This of course comes with a cost. All of those implicit layout adjustments have overhead. The ability for your code to handle content you never thought it would encounter requires CPU time. That cost isn't worth it for certain applications. But it isn't a waste, or a sign of the moral decline of "kids these days". It's a conscious tradeoff that any good developer can weigh and consider for what it is.