7 ms·

> Look, most modern software is spending 99.9% of the time waiting for user input, and 0.1% of the time actually calculating something It's because of this men

by bakugo 4y ago

> Look, most modern software is spending 99.9% of the time waiting for user input, and 0.1% of the time actually calculating something It's because of this mentality that almost all desktop software nowadays is bloated garbage that needs 2GB of RAM and a 5Ghz CPU to perform even the most basic task that could be done with 1/100th of the resources 20 years ago.

bitwize 4y ago
RAM and GPU are cheap. Most users aren't going to notice. Meanwhile by choosing Electron, the developers were able to roll out the app on Windows, Mac, and Linux at nearly zero marginal cost per additional platform.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  > Most users aren't going to notice. And other lies you can tell yourself to sleep at night. Most people notice. Very few have the capacity, power (or realise) to complain about it. They accept what they’ve been given, despite how awful it is, because they have basically no other option. A concrete example: my previous work had to use bitbucket pipelines for our docker builds. My current work uses GitHub actions. GH has my container half-built before I can even click through to the page. Bitbucket took a good minute to start. My complaints about bitbucket fell on deaf ears in the business, and no amount of leaving feedback for Atlassian to “please make builds faster” ever made the slightest amount of difference. Every time MS teams comes up that’s met with complaints about performance (among other things) so people definitely notice that. VS Code gets celebrated for “actually having decent performance”, so the bar is so low that even moderate performance apps receive high praise. Users definitely notice performance, whether the PM/business cares is a different matter, but we should stop deceiving ourselves by saying it’s alright because “users won’t notice or care”.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Yup.. and if facebook didn't invest in a native mobile app, they'd been eliminated 10 years ago. Performance is a feature. Or does anyone here enjoy using an old tomtom gps where every tap on the screen takes 2 seconds? If so, please donate your beefy laptops to charity.
- elxr 4y ago
  RAM is not cheap if you look at what apple charges for it.
  - verinus 4y ago
    compared to hourly rates of devs- even around the world? really?
doodlesdev 4y ago
No, it's not because of this mentality. Remember the timeless quote: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." Using Electron and bloated frameworks that "abstract" things away is the biggest problem for most modern software, not the fact the developers aren't optimizing 10 cycles from the CPU away. It's a fundamental issue of how the software is made and not what the code is. If you need to run a whole web browser for your application, you already lost, there is no optimization that you can do there. I think the sibling comment here in this thread shows what some developers think. Electron is not reasonable. "Developers" using Electron should be punished by CBT and chinese torture. Okay maybe that's too much. But I suggest a new quote: "We should forget about Electron, say about 100% of the time: electron is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in rewriting everything in Rust."

by bakugo 4y ago

bitwize 4y ago

RAM and GPU are cheap. Most users aren't going to notice. Meanwhile by choosing Electron, the developers were able to roll out the app on Windows, Mac, and Linux at nearly zero marginal cost per additional platform.

FridgeSeal 4y ago
> Most users aren't going to notice. And other lies you can tell yourself to sleep at night. Most people notice. Very few have the capacity, power (or realise) to complain about it. They accept what they’ve been given, despite how awful it is, because they have basically no other option. A concrete example: my previous work had to use bitbucket pipelines for our docker builds. My current work uses GitHub actions. GH has my container half-built before I can even click through to the page. Bitbucket took a good minute to start. My complaints about bitbucket fell on deaf ears in the business, and no amount of leaving feedback for Atlassian to “please make builds faster” ever made the slightest amount of difference. Every time MS teams comes up that’s met with complaints about performance (among other things) so people definitely notice that. VS Code gets celebrated for “actually having decent performance”, so the bar is so low that even moderate performance apps receive high praise. Users definitely notice performance, whether the PM/business cares is a different matter, but we should stop deceiving ourselves by saying it’s alright because “users won’t notice or care”.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Yup.. and if facebook didn't invest in a native mobile app, they'd been eliminated 10 years ago. Performance is a feature. Or does anyone here enjoy using an old tomtom gps where every tap on the screen takes 2 seconds? If so, please donate your beefy laptops to charity.
elxr 4y ago
RAM is not cheap if you look at what apple charges for it.
- verinus 4y ago
  compared to hourly rates of devs- even around the world? really?

doodlesdev 4y ago

No, it's not because of this mentality. Remember the timeless quote: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." Using Electron and bloated frameworks that "abstract" things away is the biggest problem for most modern software, not the fact the developers aren't optimizing 10 cycles from the CPU away. It's a fundamental issue of how the software is made and not what the code is. If you need to run a whole web browser for your application, you already lost, there is no optimization that you can do there. I think the sibling comment here in this thread shows what some developers think. Electron is not reasonable. "Developers" using Electron should be punished by CBT and chinese torture. Okay maybe that's too much. But I suggest a new quote: "We should forget about Electron, say about 100% of the time: electron is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in rewriting everything in Rust."