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I really dislike the article, here are some reasons (referencing the numbered arguments in the article). 1. There are many such parsers. Rusts bindgen [1] is o

by jupp0r 5y ago

I really dislike the article, here are some reasons (referencing the numbered arguments in the article). 1. There are many such parsers. Rusts bindgen [1] is one of them, I have written a proprietary one last year. This is pretty common to do for narrow use cases, there just isn't one for "Convert a C API to Ruby".. 2. "Most VM designs I’ve seen are basically just student exercises". Seriously? Create a better on and get rich then! I'm pretty sure Google would pay good money for something better than v8. 3. You can run z/OS on EC2. They do very different things. It's like saying I wish that cars were as simple as a strawberry. 4. "People used to make GUI frameworks which did more than electron apps, looked better and fit in the tens of kilobytes range." That's correct and that's why lots of apps are based on native UI frameworks. For some use cases, electron seems to hit a sweet spot (mostly not having to write UI for each platform and the web too). If you don't like electron apps, don't use them, most run in the browser too. 5. "Compilers and interpreters should learn how modern computers work." I don't know where to begin here. Modern compilers optimize for latest hardware all the time, one recent example out of thousand others is this [2] where V8 redundantly inserts short functions into memory regions close to the code they are called from in order to get more instruction cache hits. [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen [2] https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-is-now-dramatically-faster-heres-why https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-is-now-dramatic...

pdimitar 5y ago
Look, I agree that the article could've used a more productive tone but saying "just don't use Electron apps" is misguided. We don't have a choice. IMO it's perfectly fine to be consistently unhappy on that point and to rant about it.
- jupp0r 5y ago
  You can be perfectly unhappy, sure. My point was just to go a little deeper than just rant and talk about the economics of why companies choose electron in spite of all the disadvantages it comes with.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    I agree on that but from my side the answer of "why use Electron?" is fairly obvious at this point. I could be wrong. For a guy like myself it'd be more interesting to have the much more tricky discussion of "how can we not use Electron without spending millions on inventing a cross-platform native GUI toolkit?". I recognize that's a personal preference, yep.

by jupp0r 5y ago

pdimitar 5y ago

Look, I agree that the article could've used a more productive tone but saying "just don't use Electron apps" is misguided. We don't have a choice. IMO it's perfectly fine to be consistently unhappy on that point and to rant about it.

jupp0r 5y ago
You can be perfectly unhappy, sure. My point was just to go a little deeper than just rant and talk about the economics of why companies choose electron in spite of all the disadvantages it comes with.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I agree on that but from my side the answer of "why use Electron?" is fairly obvious at this point. I could be wrong. For a guy like myself it'd be more interesting to have the much more tricky discussion of "how can we not use Electron without spending millions on inventing a cross-platform native GUI toolkit?". I recognize that's a personal preference, yep.