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I fear the day we replace everything with JavaScript. All JavaScript apps are so unbelievably slow compared to native apps with native toolkits. At work I need

by foepys 6y ago

I fear the day we replace everything with JavaScript. All JavaScript apps are so unbelievably slow compared to native apps with native toolkits. At work I need to use MS Teams and holy shit it's so slow and if I'm compiling code it's barely usable on an 8 core processor. I had better performance with chat clients in 2002 on hardware that was about 1% as fast as mine today. VS Code is also very slow, you just don't notice it as much on today's machines.

esrauch 6y ago
I don't think it's safe to generalize "x is slow and electron, y is fast and native" to mean "native is fast". Electron lowering barrier to entry also means it's used by projects who aren't going to carefully profile their app no matter what, so the same app written as a native app would also be garbage. At least some of it is "correlation not causation" And for your chat example, when I was at IBM the Sametime chat native app couldn't even accept single line incoming text without grinding a several thousand dollar machine to a halt. Bad software is going to be bad no matter what language it's written in.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Electron lowers barriers for people who know web development already. Not generally. Lotus apps were known for being unusually slow. Visual Studio Code is known for being unusually fast for an Electron app. And it still chokes on files Sublime Text handles easily.
- epr 6y ago
  "native is fast" is a statement of fact that is not open to debate. That fact is obvious to anyone who understands enough about compilers. The real question is "Are the tradeoffs between native and $portable_platform worth it?", which is generally subjective.
zodiakzz 6y ago
>VS Code is also very slow, you just don't notice it as much on today's machines. Seemed to be running great on Core 2 Duo machines of the kids learning coding at a remote village I visited recently.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wenc 6y ago
  In fact, I was using VS Code on 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2GHz machine up to a year ago. Without extensions, the responsiveness was fine -- definitely not as responsive as gvim, but otherwise no complaints. When I added extensions, it did start to feel laggy but once I turned off all extensions save one (the language server extension -- in my case, Python) it was fine again. With my current machine (a refurbed 2014 Intel i7 Dell desktop), VS Code is pretty responsive even with extensions enabled.
lvass 6y ago
Flutter is far more worrying IMO. The Web at least is somewhat standardized and definitely going to last long. There's also nothing intrinsically too slow about it, JS runtimes can definitely be made fast and render engines tend to improve over time, it's also likely we will move on from Electron and it's bloat-packed delivery method. Everything is easily inspect-able as shipped. Compared to that Flutter programs are a huge black-box, completely unportable as delivered not just across platforms but also between accessibility mechanisms it seems. While practically sharing none of the advantages of traditional native toolkits. Responsiveness is dismal, web/desktop targets are basically a PoC, the language and toolkit are so large it's extremely unlikely people will bother maintaining it when Google deprecates it, even if it's 100 times more popular than now. It's just disheartening how people are still keen on developing things far too likely to end in a platform graveyard.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CodeArtisan 6y ago
Flutter is based on Dart which compiles AOT to machine code.
- nsonha 6y ago
  Did you find that on wikileak?
fizdoonk 6y ago
on chromebook with rockchip cpu and 4gb memory, handles c#, go, and dart project just fine
antihero 6y ago
I wouldn't say that is true. For something like React Native, the apps are plenty fast as JS is just used as an expressive control layer for the heavy lifting done in native code. I think a well maintained React Native for desktop is a really good way forward. People don't really care about a native "look and feel" any more so long as it's pretty, consistent, and integrates into the OS. Which is why electron is popular. I think the slowness of having everything rendered by a webview is the main drawback of electron, which is solved by React Native which only needs to run JSC or V8 somewhere.
thiht 6y ago
> VS Code is also very slow, you just don't notice it as much on today's machines. That's plain wrong. I recently upgraded my 7 years old mid range laptop and VSCode ran just fine on it, even with the required set of extensions for my projects. I upgraded because I had other issues, but VSCode wasn't one.
- foepys 6y ago
  Considering Intel's pretty poor performance improvements over the last 10 years, your 7 y/o laptop is actually pretty fast. People are still using their 2015 MacBook Pros as their main machines. Did you try loading a 50MB CSV (or similar) into VS Code? It just seems fast but it's actually pretty slow but hidden by the raw power. Especially anything doing code analysis or typing hints is moving at glacial speeds compared to native or Java-based editors/IDEs. You just don't notice it because you probably either never experienced it or forgot how fast it can be. Everytime I have to use VS Code instead of Visual Studio, I slow down my typing because I need to wait for VSC to show me the hints.
agilob 6y ago
>At work I need to use MS Teams and holy shit it's so slow a Try Slack on Firefox or Android. Who the hell has 40 seconds for a chat to load?!
gnulinux 6y ago
I honestly don't think this is a JS problem. I don't use many js apps, but I use emacs, and it's also very slow. Most of the android apps are slow. When I'm streaming something, especially on twitch, sometimes my computer can't do anything else. And I'm on a pretty good hardware (ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen). Modern software is just slow, buggy and trash. Sure maybe gtk and qt are better, but they're pretty bad too. Software is just fundamentally bad because no one, even people who're paid to make software, cares about their quality. If global warming doesn't end up killing us all, I hope we fundamentally change the way we approach to software in the next decades.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  Too much software engineering is learned on the job, and your job is usually dictated by laymen you have no control over and who may or may not give a damn about your career. You might work at a hygenic, technical garden, you might work at an Agile SCRUM feature factory that de facto prohibits re-factoring. But University CS programs aren't the proper place for this pedagogy either, and I don't see SWE guilds popping up for a few reasons.

by foepys 6y ago

esrauch 6y ago

I don't think it's safe to generalize "x is slow and electron, y is fast and native" to mean "native is fast". Electron lowering barrier to entry also means it's used by projects who aren't going to carefully profile their app no matter what, so the same app written as a native app would also be garbage. At least some of it is "correlation not causation" And for your chat example, when I was at IBM the Sametime chat native app couldn't even accept single line incoming text without grinding a several thousand dollar machine to a halt. Bad software is going to be bad no matter what language it's written in.

pseudalopex 6y ago
Electron lowers barriers for people who know web development already. Not generally. Lotus apps were known for being unusually slow. Visual Studio Code is known for being unusually fast for an Electron app. And it still chokes on files Sublime Text handles easily.
epr 6y ago
"native is fast" is a statement of fact that is not open to debate. That fact is obvious to anyone who understands enough about compilers. The real question is "Are the tradeoffs between native and $portable_platform worth it?", which is generally subjective.

zodiakzz 6y ago

>VS Code is also very slow, you just don't notice it as much on today's machines. Seemed to be running great on Core 2 Duo machines of the kids learning coding at a remote village I visited recently.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wenc 6y ago
In fact, I was using VS Code on 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2GHz machine up to a year ago. Without extensions, the responsiveness was fine -- definitely not as responsive as gvim, but otherwise no complaints. When I added extensions, it did start to feel laggy but once I turned off all extensions save one (the language server extension -- in my case, Python) it was fine again. With my current machine (a refurbed 2014 Intel i7 Dell desktop), VS Code is pretty responsive even with extensions enabled.

lvass 6y ago

Flutter is far more worrying IMO. The Web at least is somewhat standardized and definitely going to last long. There's also nothing intrinsically too slow about it, JS runtimes can definitely be made fast and render engines tend to improve over time, it's also likely we will move on from Electron and it's bloat-packed delivery method. Everything is easily inspect-able as shipped. Compared to that Flutter programs are a huge black-box, completely unportable as delivered not just across platforms but also between accessibility mechanisms it seems. While practically sharing none of the advantages of traditional native toolkits. Responsiveness is dismal, web/desktop targets are basically a PoC, the language and toolkit are so large it's extremely unlikely people will bother maintaining it when Google deprecates it, even if it's 100 times more popular than now. It's just disheartening how people are still keen on developing things far too likely to end in a platform graveyard.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CodeArtisan 6y ago

Flutter is based on Dart which compiles AOT to machine code.

nsonha 6y ago
Did you find that on wikileak?

fizdoonk 6y ago

on chromebook with rockchip cpu and 4gb memory, handles c#, go, and dart project just fine

antihero 6y ago

I wouldn't say that is true. For something like React Native, the apps are plenty fast as JS is just used as an expressive control layer for the heavy lifting done in native code. I think a well maintained React Native for desktop is a really good way forward. People don't really care about a native "look and feel" any more so long as it's pretty, consistent, and integrates into the OS. Which is why electron is popular. I think the slowness of having everything rendered by a webview is the main drawback of electron, which is solved by React Native which only needs to run JSC or V8 somewhere.

thiht 6y ago

> VS Code is also very slow, you just don't notice it as much on today's machines. That's plain wrong. I recently upgraded my 7 years old mid range laptop and VSCode ran just fine on it, even with the required set of extensions for my projects. I upgraded because I had other issues, but VSCode wasn't one.

foepys 6y ago
Considering Intel's pretty poor performance improvements over the last 10 years, your 7 y/o laptop is actually pretty fast. People are still using their 2015 MacBook Pros as their main machines. Did you try loading a 50MB CSV (or similar) into VS Code? It just seems fast but it's actually pretty slow but hidden by the raw power. Especially anything doing code analysis or typing hints is moving at glacial speeds compared to native or Java-based editors/IDEs. You just don't notice it because you probably either never experienced it or forgot how fast it can be. Everytime I have to use VS Code instead of Visual Studio, I slow down my typing because I need to wait for VSC to show me the hints.

agilob 6y ago

>At work I need to use MS Teams and holy shit it's so slow a Try Slack on Firefox or Android. Who the hell has 40 seconds for a chat to load?!

gnulinux 6y ago

I honestly don't think this is a JS problem. I don't use many js apps, but I use emacs, and it's also very slow. Most of the android apps are slow. When I'm streaming something, especially on twitch, sometimes my computer can't do anything else. And I'm on a pretty good hardware (ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen). Modern software is just slow, buggy and trash. Sure maybe gtk and qt are better, but they're pretty bad too. Software is just fundamentally bad because no one, even people who're paid to make software, cares about their quality. If global warming doesn't end up killing us all, I hope we fundamentally change the way we approach to software in the next decades.

imbnwa 6y ago
Too much software engineering is learned on the job, and your job is usually dictated by laymen you have no control over and who may or may not give a damn about your career. You might work at a hygenic, technical garden, you might work at an Agile SCRUM feature factory that de facto prohibits re-factoring. But University CS programs aren't the proper place for this pedagogy either, and I don't see SWE guilds popping up for a few reasons.