5 ms·
The majority of users who own an M1 are never going to push it to 100% utilisation. So whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted as
by threeseed 3y ago
The majority of users who own an M1 are never going to push it to 100% utilisation.
So whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted assembler isn't going to make much of a difference to the end user experience.
Electron and similar apps serve a legitimate purpose in the marketplace which is to allow developers to deliver a cross-platform app for the same cost as a single platform one.
- bombolo 3y agoDecent developers can do that in C++
- seanthemon 3y agoDecenter developers can do that with a magnetized needle and a steady hand
- dijit 3y agoI wonder if there is a name for the idea that the more you earn the lazier you get. Sysadmins used to know a lot but earn pittance compared to “devops” or “SRE”; then those more expensive folks outsourced the majority of their hard work to cloud vendors who charge 5-11x the cost for compute. Developers earn 5-10x more than 15 years ago, yet continue to choose solutions for their own convenience and time saving. Stating that its better for the company if they have to work less. Surely at some point its just your job to consider the entire ecosystem and your contribution to it. Otherwise why are you worth all that money?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pocketarc 3y agoBecause they -are- providing value, and because dev resources are limited. If you're a dev, do you think your company would want you to spend 2 weeks on building a new feature, or on "considering the entire ecosystem"? And more than that - if you have a team that only/mostly has web experience, they're going to use Electron, and... what kind of company would want them to stop and go learn native app development, or hire extra people just to get a native app? Note: I fully agree with you, I do feel that as a profession we really have descended into a weird "ship the MVP, ship new features non-stop, forget quality" reality, and I dislike it. I'd love it if everything was resource-thrifty native apps, and dev teams could stop chasing new and shiny things and work on improving their existing apps until they were shiny polished diamonds. I'd love to point to an app and say "see? this is 20 years of development, look at how nice it is, how perfectly thought out everything is, how everything just works flawlessly". But the fact that that's not happening is not because devs are lazy, or not worth their money. It just doesn't make business sense.
- johnnyworker 3y ago> I'd love to point to an app and say "see? this is 20 years of development, look at how nice it is, how perfectly thought out everything is, how everything just works flawlessly". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Opus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Opus
- ido 3y agoI don’t think developers earn 5-10x more than 15 years ago. Assuming you’re using something like $250k as a typical salary (for dev jobs at US tech-hubs) I guarantee you the typical equivalent in 2008 was not $25-50k.
- dijit 3y agoAverage income in tech-hub area in 2007 was: $85,355 for "Software Developers"[0] Salary for developers that we discuss on HN seems to be in the region of $250k base, but that's not factoring in TC- which seems to be the bulk of income for the last 5 years. It's not unheard of around here to hear people talking about pulling in half-million if they are ex-FAANG. Which is nearly everybody these days. [0]: source is here: https://www.datamation.com/careers/developer-salary-levels-2004-2009/ https://www.datamation.com/careers/developer-salary-levels-2... based on https://e-janco.com https://e-janco.com
- ido 3y agoI don’t think it’s nearly everybody these days, but that it may seem like that if you happen to be in FAANG-heavy local bubble.
- bombolo 3y agoAlso, but it's easier in C++ and it consumes 99% less resources.
- edu 3y agoReal hackers use C-x M-c M-butterfly https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- tsimionescu 3y agoSure, if they're calling into an Electron front-end. Otherwise, each front-end is different so no amount of C++ and dev exeperience is going to take your Android UI calls and transform them into iOS UI calls. So, you'll have to build your own wrappers over each native UI framework to interact with, costing more money.
- bombolo 3y agoAh, you live in a parallel universe which is the same as ours but Qt and other frameworks to do exactly this but without wasting a ton of resources don't exist?
- jb1991 3y agoDecent developers don’t leave comments like this about other developers.
- semiquaver 3y ago“640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
- asdgioanionio 3y agoA machine that is 99% idle isn't running at 1% utilization all the time. It's idling 99% of the time and running flat out 1% of the time. The user pushes at least one core to the limit with every action they take, even if only for microseconds. This is why performance matters even with a machine that is mostly idle. A faster system will respond faster to events. It will have lower latency when communicating over a network. It will handle user inputs faster. Users will complain that a program takes a second to respond even if the load average is 0.01. (I know CPUs enter lower-performance states when lightly loaded. They can go from idle to their highest performance state in much less time than it takes for the user to notice latency.)
- vmladenov 3y ago> whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted assembler isn't going to make much of a difference to the end user experience Subjectively, every Electron app I’ve used including the local beloved VSCode has been a painful UX. I can always tell. Nothing makes a fast computer feel slow quite like them, it’s amazing. I would settle for React Native at this point.
- fxtentacle 3y agoFrom the fine article: "Remember when Photoshop opened in 1s on SSD?" I do remember. And it now takes A LOT longer on insanely fast CPUs and SSDs. And I hate it every time I have to wait for it.
- wiseowise 3y agoSo it’s not Electron that’s slow, but modern software?
- bombcar 3y agoElectron is an example of modern software that’s slow. And it’s common and exceptionally slow. I think most software is designed to load once and never be quit; you’re probably just supposed to leave photosnot running in the background and let it swap to disk if needed. But I have a hard time running like that, I quit programs when I’m done using them.
- vGPU 3y agoI have a liquid cooled 14 core processor that runs at 5.7GHz. 96Gb of DDR5. Top of the line Samsung m.2 drive. Photoshop still takes a good 30 seconds+ to open.