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That's funny. I've been doing full-stack embedded development (bootloader assembly all the way to touchscreen UIs) for 30 years but the idea of trying to learn

That's funny. I've been doing full-stack embedded development (bootloader assembly all the way to touchscreen UIs) for 30 years but the idea of trying to learn modern web front end scares the hell out of me. React? Angular? Node? What happened to Notepad and Apache?

xondono 5y ago
I would recommend to revisit that with fresh eyes. I’ve found that’s easier to build a simple UI by loading chromium + webapp than having to deal with the intricacies of multitarget crosscompiling.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  That ecosystem used to suck heavily as of 3-5 years ago, but I know it's improving. But you still need Node and a bunch of shit running underneath to glue the UI to the drivers. As much as I'm starting to hate Qt, I can still have it up and taking to hardware in a few minutes. And the onscreen touchscreen keyboard is worth the money.
  - VRay 5y ago
    Node is a nightmare I can get a decently functional UI app working in native code with just the SDK for whatever platform it’s on, but try to use React and suddenly I’ve got a web of 200 dependencies, each more shady than the last. And that’s just for “hello, world” Plus the JavaScript engine is single-threaded and insanely slow.. it’s gross. I’m guessing that one of these days app developers are collectively going to snap out of it and throw Node in the trash
    - joezydeco 5y ago
      No, it's only going to get worse. As single-board devices get faster and cheaper by the week there's a flood of developers that have cut their teeth on Node/JS/React and they get something working on a Raspberry Pi and think "Yeah, embedded development is a piece of cake. I can do this." And maybe they're right, because doing it all by scratch and cobbling together robot parts to make a system work is just really getting to be old. I used to get annoyed at the RPi newbies but now I welcome it as job security because someone still needs to write the bootloader and drivers. And if you read StackOverflow/Reddit you'll see there's nobody teaching that anymore.
      - VRay 5y ago
        Man, I kinda feel like embedded software is doomed. There are only a dozen or so companies where embedded software is a first-tier product for them that gets a lot of resources put into it. It feels like everything is moving toward using super low-quality Chinese drivers/firmware and really badly-designed microkernels (or treating linux like a microkernel) to squeeze all the functionality out of the OS and into bad managed software stacks. Then again, any company that takes firmware engineering seriously can make devices 5+ years before Moore's Law makes it feasible for others, so maybe there'll always be room for us.
        joezydeco 5y ago
        It feels like everything is moving toward using super low-quality Chinese drivers/firmware You must be a Broadcom user. My sympathies. =) But I totally hear you. I'm not as pessimistic because I tend to follow parts that the automotive sector uses (yeah, not great right now) and they typically don't put up with random Chinesium parts and code. And yeah, it seems more and more like everyone is just throwing Linux into the mix and hoping that some OSS developer and/or Otavio Salvador swoops in and fixes things up. RISC-V may be a way out of this. Maybe. Or it will make things ten times worse.
  - xondono 5y ago
    It does depend on the platform you are using. One of the devices I’m working on had to use rust (we were looking for some niche libraries, and we found that the C ones weren’t working, while the Rust ones did). Building GUIs in rust is still a WIP, and I had to spend 2-3 days fixing libs and tweeking stuff to get to something that compiled but was very buggy. Instead of losing more time on that I set chromium + apache on the thing, and built the GUI as a web app. The rust executable has a simple API with actix that works flawlessly. In that case it was the perfect solution because I had to add an API for remote management anyway, but I found the approach quite nice to work with.
BenjiWiebe 5y ago
Notepad and Apache are still present and working. Probably not a good choice for a payment processing single page online store, but fine for a simple informational website.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > Probably not a good choice for a payment processing single page online store Why not, out of curiosity?
  - collinmanderson 5y ago
    I got started making websites with Notepad and eventually Apache. Nothing wrong with Apache, but syntax highlighting would be nice to have in Notepad.
throw0101a 5y ago
> What happened to Notepad and Apache? * https://motherfuckingwebsite.com https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

xondono 5y ago

I would recommend to revisit that with fresh eyes. I’ve found that’s easier to build a simple UI by loading chromium + webapp than having to deal with the intricacies of multitarget crosscompiling.

joezydeco 5y ago
That ecosystem used to suck heavily as of 3-5 years ago, but I know it's improving. But you still need Node and a bunch of shit running underneath to glue the UI to the drivers. As much as I'm starting to hate Qt, I can still have it up and taking to hardware in a few minutes. And the onscreen touchscreen keyboard is worth the money.
- VRay 5y ago
  Node is a nightmare I can get a decently functional UI app working in native code with just the SDK for whatever platform it’s on, but try to use React and suddenly I’ve got a web of 200 dependencies, each more shady than the last. And that’s just for “hello, world” Plus the JavaScript engine is single-threaded and insanely slow.. it’s gross. I’m guessing that one of these days app developers are collectively going to snap out of it and throw Node in the trash
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    No, it's only going to get worse. As single-board devices get faster and cheaper by the week there's a flood of developers that have cut their teeth on Node/JS/React and they get something working on a Raspberry Pi and think "Yeah, embedded development is a piece of cake. I can do this." And maybe they're right, because doing it all by scratch and cobbling together robot parts to make a system work is just really getting to be old. I used to get annoyed at the RPi newbies but now I welcome it as job security because someone still needs to write the bootloader and drivers. And if you read StackOverflow/Reddit you'll see there's nobody teaching that anymore.
    - VRay 5y ago
      Man, I kinda feel like embedded software is doomed. There are only a dozen or so companies where embedded software is a first-tier product for them that gets a lot of resources put into it. It feels like everything is moving toward using super low-quality Chinese drivers/firmware and really badly-designed microkernels (or treating linux like a microkernel) to squeeze all the functionality out of the OS and into bad managed software stacks. Then again, any company that takes firmware engineering seriously can make devices 5+ years before Moore's Law makes it feasible for others, so maybe there'll always be room for us.
      - joezydeco 5y ago
        It feels like everything is moving toward using super low-quality Chinese drivers/firmware You must be a Broadcom user. My sympathies. =) But I totally hear you. I'm not as pessimistic because I tend to follow parts that the automotive sector uses (yeah, not great right now) and they typically don't put up with random Chinesium parts and code. And yeah, it seems more and more like everyone is just throwing Linux into the mix and hoping that some OSS developer and/or Otavio Salvador swoops in and fixes things up. RISC-V may be a way out of this. Maybe. Or it will make things ten times worse.
- xondono 5y ago
  It does depend on the platform you are using. One of the devices I’m working on had to use rust (we were looking for some niche libraries, and we found that the C ones weren’t working, while the Rust ones did). Building GUIs in rust is still a WIP, and I had to spend 2-3 days fixing libs and tweeking stuff to get to something that compiled but was very buggy. Instead of losing more time on that I set chromium + apache on the thing, and built the GUI as a web app. The rust executable has a simple API with actix that works flawlessly. In that case it was the perfect solution because I had to add an API for remote management anyway, but I found the approach quite nice to work with.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago

Notepad and Apache are still present and working. Probably not a good choice for a payment processing single page online store, but fine for a simple informational website.

tentacleuno 5y ago
> Probably not a good choice for a payment processing single page online store Why not, out of curiosity?
- collinmanderson 5y ago
  I got started making websites with Notepad and eventually Apache. Nothing wrong with Apache, but syntax highlighting would be nice to have in Notepad.

throw0101a 5y ago

> What happened to Notepad and Apache? * https://motherfuckingwebsite.com https://motherfuckingwebsite.com