3 ms·

Ah ok. When I talk about fast I am usually referring to user perception rather than clock cycles spent. Users won't notice 1ms vs 10ms but will notice 100ms or

Ah ok. When I talk about fast I am usually referring to user perception rather than clock cycles spent. Users won't notice 1ms vs 10ms but will notice 100ms or 1000ms. For me, it's a law of diminishing returns thing. I would (and have) hand roll assembly if I want actual speed. But we are talking about personal software. Write once, run everywhere browser's exist with essentially no tooling or complexity or deployment concerns. What does writing everything in rust get me instead that is worth the significant increase in effort and dev time and deployment?

josephg 1mo ago
> Users won't notice 1ms vs 10ms but will notice 100ms or 1000ms. I just don't see any software made with web tech that loads in less than 100ms. Here in Australia, it usually takes longer than that for a single packet to get to the US and back. The Fastmail iOS app is an embedded web app. A fresh launch on my iphone takes about 3 seconds before emails become visible on screen. On my desktop computer, Spotify loads in about 3 seconds. Discord loads in ~12 seconds. These are all packaged web applications, which can store and cache whatever data they want. And we're talking startup times of several seconds. There's also ram usage. I just opened spotify out of curiosity on windows. Spotify - as I understand it - uses the platform native browser. Just being open - not even playing anything - spotify sits at about 650-800mb of ram. The DDR5 ram sticks I have currently cost about $30 AUD per gigabyte. So, spotify is reserving about $20 worth of my ram the whole time its open. I can afford that. But I didn't buy all this ram so spotify engineers could be slobs with it. According to a quick google search, Winamp 2 used 4-10mb. There exist pure native apps which also launch slowly and use a lot of ram. Davinci resolve also takes several seconds to launch. So does intellij. But these are much more complex programs than a music player or chat app. If you're making tiny apps for yourself, I can definitely see the appeal of using web technology from a deployment standpoint. But if it were up to me, we'd port the web's software deployment model to work with native programs. Make native software as good as web dev and cut the browser out of the picture entirely. If ram costs 5x as much, I wanna see my software start using 5x less RAM when it runs. I just don't see that happening in the browser.

josephg 1mo ago

> Users won't notice 1ms vs 10ms but will notice 100ms or 1000ms. I just don't see any software made with web tech that loads in less than 100ms. Here in Australia, it usually takes longer than that for a single packet to get to the US and back. The Fastmail iOS app is an embedded web app. A fresh launch on my iphone takes about 3 seconds before emails become visible on screen. On my desktop computer, Spotify loads in about 3 seconds. Discord loads in ~12 seconds. These are all packaged web applications, which can store and cache whatever data they want. And we're talking startup times of several seconds. There's also ram usage. I just opened spotify out of curiosity on windows. Spotify - as I understand it - uses the platform native browser. Just being open - not even playing anything - spotify sits at about 650-800mb of ram. The DDR5 ram sticks I have currently cost about $30 AUD per gigabyte. So, spotify is reserving about $20 worth of my ram the whole time its open. I can afford that. But I didn't buy all this ram so spotify engineers could be slobs with it. According to a quick google search, Winamp 2 used 4-10mb. There exist pure native apps which also launch slowly and use a lot of ram. Davinci resolve also takes several seconds to launch. So does intellij. But these are much more complex programs than a music player or chat app. If you're making tiny apps for yourself, I can definitely see the appeal of using web technology from a deployment standpoint. But if it were up to me, we'd port the web's software deployment model to work with native programs. Make native software as good as web dev and cut the browser out of the picture entirely. If ram costs 5x as much, I wanna see my software start using 5x less RAM when it runs. I just don't see that happening in the browser.