on bad necrocomputing takes
Sometimes I see takes like "computers used to be able to do the same job using way less resources, software is shit nowadays"
And I can only wonder whether they've ever developed software back when real-time compositing was unaffordably expensive, and so was proper process isolation, and a million other 'modern conveniences' that make software, y'know, not suck
re: on bad necrocomputing takes
@radostin04 I find the typical complaints about "everything is a web browser" to be particularly ill-informed, both on "what *is* a browser even", "how different is it actually from a UI framework", and "why are people using these to begin with"
re: on bad necrocomputing takes
@radostin04 To provide a bit more detail, here are some of the common arguments raised to support those complaints:
- "People are shipping entire copies of Chrome with every application"
- "You can't even share a runtime between Electron apps"
- "Electron apps need so much RAM"
- "Electron is so bloated"
- "UI frameworks are much simpler"
- "Electron is popular because people are lazy"
Every single one of these is false, but widespread. Every. Single One.
Electron uses CEF, not Chrome; not the same thing. It absolutely *can* share a runtime. The baseline RAM use is like what, 60MB? There's a reason that every major standalone UI framework nowadays has adopted *some* form of CSS. And so on, and so forth.
All of these claims are so ill-informed and so obviously based on assumptions rather than actual knowledge of the technology, that I have long ago stopped taking these complaints seriously.
If people want developers to stop using Electron, they need to ask the hard questions about why it is being used to begin with, without resorting to handwavy excuses like "lazy developers". And then work to actually build something better that ticks those boxes. Because the currently available alternatives don't.
If we're limiting discussion to OS/firmware-level improvements like "process isolation" or "speculative execution mitigation" and calling them "modern conveniences" I might agree with you, but so many of the decisions that make up modern computing are based on "computers only get faster".
Can you honestly say last decade's fad of replacing HTML/CSS with single-page apps made the web suck less? How about replacing desktop apps with single-use web browsers that eat up 2GB of RAM apiece? Does the mere concept of needing to stand up a "language server" for _syntax highlighting_ not raise your hackles?
Fair enough I only started writing software professionally under a decade ago (and primarily in Python so I'm also a part of the problem), but that doesn't mean I can't see all the waste in the profession.
on bad necrocomputing takes
@joepie91 this is true to some extent, but at the same time not literally every piece of software needs to be a web browser please