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> And I believe the web platform is a good existential hedge against the undying forever turning-to-crap-iness that so widely defines the trend of everything el

> And I believe the web platform is a good existential hedge against the undying forever turning-to-crap-iness that so widely defines the trend of everything else. I'm sorry to say, but my view is the exact opposite. I can place nearly all the blame for the current state of the software ecosystem on overuse of web technologies and JavaScript.

rektide 4y ago
Make an actual claim please. You've made no case, not explained why you think so very poorly, offered nothing that could be argued with or contested. This isnt useful or contributive.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  My claims: - the rise of Electron means that: 1. a lot of native applications got killed off 2. those that remain have fewer features (native applications generally tended to be feature-rich). For example the web version of Outlook is nowhere near as feature-ful as the true native version for Windows. 3. Electron apps have worse UX due to much slower response times to every single click (which is both perceptible and infuriating, if you are one of the people that can see it), consume much more RAM (no, RAM is not cheap - maybe for you it is, but is it cheap for the end user?), and do not use native controls a lot of the time. The former two points can be verified by loading Microsoft Teams. 4. Even if the user has enough RAM for an Electron application, they may not have enough RAM for five. Lighter-weight alternatives aren't always available, and sometimes you just have to run that many side by side if required by your work. - due to this, many machines that could have otherwise been useful for a few more years (anything with <=4 GB of RAM in my experience, YMMV) became e-waste prematurely because of the accelerated obsolescence, which not only imposes unfair cost on the consumer, but is also bad for the planet. - the JavaScript ecosystem largely relies on NPM for dependencies. NPM is very far from the level of maturity achieved by comparable ecosystems for other programming languages. This means that somewhere down in your dependency chain, your application relies on something ridiculous like left-pad. This results in a technically inferior product, and more pragmatically speaking, introduces many more opportunities for third parties to break your dependency chain (intentionally or not), or to slip in extra code (I think it was node-gyp, a common dependency, that selectively ran in destructive mode in case the current machine's geoip was Russian or Belarusian). A lot of the points I raised about Electron apply to JavaScript as well. TL;DR: the JavaScript ecosystem is not very conducive to good (stable and performant) engineering, short of heroic efforts like those undertaken by the VS Code team. Most teams don't actually care as much, so the resultant Electron applications are slow and unnecessarily huge. The result is a worse user experience.
  - usrn 4y ago
    Electron only became popular because of the extremely developer hostile nature of mobile OSes.
    - kllrnohj 4y ago
      That's pretty obviously untrue since Electron doesn't work on any mobile OS. It exclusively targets desktop OSes, specifically Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Places where things like QT already worked great at a tiny fraction of the compute resources required.

rektide 4y ago

Make an actual claim please. You've made no case, not explained why you think so very poorly, offered nothing that could be argued with or contested. This isnt useful or contributive.

selfhoster11 4y ago
My claims: - the rise of Electron means that: 1. a lot of native applications got killed off 2. those that remain have fewer features (native applications generally tended to be feature-rich). For example the web version of Outlook is nowhere near as feature-ful as the true native version for Windows. 3. Electron apps have worse UX due to much slower response times to every single click (which is both perceptible and infuriating, if you are one of the people that can see it), consume much more RAM (no, RAM is not cheap - maybe for you it is, but is it cheap for the end user?), and do not use native controls a lot of the time. The former two points can be verified by loading Microsoft Teams. 4. Even if the user has enough RAM for an Electron application, they may not have enough RAM for five. Lighter-weight alternatives aren't always available, and sometimes you just have to run that many side by side if required by your work. - due to this, many machines that could have otherwise been useful for a few more years (anything with <=4 GB of RAM in my experience, YMMV) became e-waste prematurely because of the accelerated obsolescence, which not only imposes unfair cost on the consumer, but is also bad for the planet. - the JavaScript ecosystem largely relies on NPM for dependencies. NPM is very far from the level of maturity achieved by comparable ecosystems for other programming languages. This means that somewhere down in your dependency chain, your application relies on something ridiculous like left-pad. This results in a technically inferior product, and more pragmatically speaking, introduces many more opportunities for third parties to break your dependency chain (intentionally or not), or to slip in extra code (I think it was node-gyp, a common dependency, that selectively ran in destructive mode in case the current machine's geoip was Russian or Belarusian). A lot of the points I raised about Electron apply to JavaScript as well. TL;DR: the JavaScript ecosystem is not very conducive to good (stable and performant) engineering, short of heroic efforts like those undertaken by the VS Code team. Most teams don't actually care as much, so the resultant Electron applications are slow and unnecessarily huge. The result is a worse user experience.
- usrn 4y ago
  Electron only became popular because of the extremely developer hostile nature of mobile OSes.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    That's pretty obviously untrue since Electron doesn't work on any mobile OS. It exclusively targets desktop OSes, specifically Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Places where things like QT already worked great at a tiny fraction of the compute resources required.