5 ms·

This one seems to be a native app for macOS, not an Electron app. So, hopefully this allows to achieve higher performance with much lighter resource utilization

This one seems to be a native app for macOS, not an Electron app. So, hopefully this allows to achieve higher performance with much lighter resource utilization.

blondin 7y ago
very interesting. i wonder about the tech behind it. always wanted to get into native mac app development but objective-c is a little daunting. i wonder if it's using swift ui?
- dewey 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/chimehq/status/1213931585336156165 https://twitter.com/chimehq/status/1213931585336156165 > It's mostly custom drawing on top of a customized AppKit textview. The Cocoa text system is wildly powerful, quite hard to do pixel perfect drawing with. No OpenGL or any fancy graphics libraries.
- mattiemass 7y ago
  I'd be happy to discuss! My first all-swift project. Was pretty rough at first, but Apple's done a great job of iterating on it. 100% AppKit, though. SwiftUI looks super cool, but it's just too new for me to feel confident relying on it. Plus, we currently support 10.14 as well.
  - blondin 7y ago
    thanks for replying! the app looks totally awesome. i was asking my question because i have been gathering resources for learning swift but from time to time i would read things like it's not mature enough with some macOS frameworks and you have to use objective-c. these comments and the fact that the language itself kept changing/evolving are often off-putting. but i think this just renewed my interest!
    - mattiemass 7y ago
      Thank you so much! I think Swift is there now. There were some very painful migrations, but for the past 2-3 years it has been different. It is true that it's a real pain to use some C-based APIs with it, but those are pretty rare. And, often you can find a Swift wrapper for them if you really need to. I've been using ObjC for 25 years, but I'm now pretty into Swift. I'd go for it.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      There are very few APIs that cannot be used from Swift. I can't even think of any off the top of my head.
    - jamil7 7y ago
      You should be fine using all swift now. The only thing is there are FAR more resources for learning Swift in an iOS context out there then macOS and you may have to figure some things out on your own.
vips7L 7y ago
So it's sublime with a smaller ecosystem?
Vesuvium 7y ago
Non-native apps can be as performant as native ones. I imagine they checked alternatives to Electron and figured a native app would allow them to have better OS integration.
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  > Non-native apps can be as performant as native ones This may be true. However, Electron apps cannot be as performant as native apps can be, which seems to be what they are getting at.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Vscode does a pretty damn good job.
    - solarkraft 7y ago
      VSCode really stands out to me among Electron apps, which is why I would be really interested in a write up about what they are doing to get it so performant (I think Rust is a part of the answer). Of course you can write terribly performing code on all platforms, but certainly some make it easier and/or have their own performance requirements.
      - monocasa 7y ago
        Part of it I think is the super text heavy use case. Unlike slack for isntance that'll have N 30MB gifs (probably multiple copies of each too) in memory at any given point.
    - filleduchaos 7y ago
      And still doesn't come close.
      - monocasa 7y ago
        It's pretty damn close if you compare it to native apps with the same feature set.

This one seems to be a native app for macOS, not an Electron app. So, hopefully this allows to achieve higher performance with much lighter resource utilization.

blondin 7y ago

very interesting. i wonder about the tech behind it. always wanted to get into native mac app development but objective-c is a little daunting. i wonder if it's using swift ui?

dewey 7y ago
https://twitter.com/chimehq/status/1213931585336156165 https://twitter.com/chimehq/status/1213931585336156165 > It's mostly custom drawing on top of a customized AppKit textview. The Cocoa text system is wildly powerful, quite hard to do pixel perfect drawing with. No OpenGL or any fancy graphics libraries.
mattiemass 7y ago
I'd be happy to discuss! My first all-swift project. Was pretty rough at first, but Apple's done a great job of iterating on it. 100% AppKit, though. SwiftUI looks super cool, but it's just too new for me to feel confident relying on it. Plus, we currently support 10.14 as well.
- blondin 7y ago
  thanks for replying! the app looks totally awesome. i was asking my question because i have been gathering resources for learning swift but from time to time i would read things like it's not mature enough with some macOS frameworks and you have to use objective-c. these comments and the fact that the language itself kept changing/evolving are often off-putting. but i think this just renewed my interest!
  - mattiemass 7y ago
    Thank you so much! I think Swift is there now. There were some very painful migrations, but for the past 2-3 years it has been different. It is true that it's a real pain to use some C-based APIs with it, but those are pretty rare. And, often you can find a Swift wrapper for them if you really need to. I've been using ObjC for 25 years, but I'm now pretty into Swift. I'd go for it.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    There are very few APIs that cannot be used from Swift. I can't even think of any off the top of my head.
  - jamil7 7y ago
    You should be fine using all swift now. The only thing is there are FAR more resources for learning Swift in an iOS context out there then macOS and you may have to figure some things out on your own.

vips7L 7y ago

So it's sublime with a smaller ecosystem?

Vesuvium 7y ago

Non-native apps can be as performant as native ones. I imagine they checked alternatives to Electron and figured a native app would allow them to have better OS integration.

buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
> Non-native apps can be as performant as native ones This may be true. However, Electron apps cannot be as performant as native apps can be, which seems to be what they are getting at.
- monocasa 7y ago
  Vscode does a pretty damn good job.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    VSCode really stands out to me among Electron apps, which is why I would be really interested in a write up about what they are doing to get it so performant (I think Rust is a part of the answer). Of course you can write terribly performing code on all platforms, but certainly some make it easier and/or have their own performance requirements.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Part of it I think is the super text heavy use case. Unlike slack for isntance that'll have N 30MB gifs (probably multiple copies of each too) in memory at any given point.
  - filleduchaos 7y ago
    And still doesn't come close.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      It's pretty damn close if you compare it to native apps with the same feature set.