Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–116 of 116 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#111

Post by jones1618 »

old-gregg wrote: post #37
seanwilson wrote: post #6

I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt. I read people saying things like Spotify and Atom are "unusable" and slow because they're written in JavaScript when they have plenty of happy users. A few 100MB of RAM or disk space extra is a nonexistent issue as well to typical users. I know some developers get very offended at a program using a bit more RAM or CPU than it should be but develo…

Every Electron app I tried halved my battery life. Sure, regular people won't complain about your electron "desktop" app, they'll just complain about crappy batteries of their laptop, or about "my computer getting slow". In fact, every time you hear a non-programmer complain about their computer it's usually not a hardware, but a software like electron that's ruining their experience. OSes have started to add applica…

I'm not sure about battery life but I was a huge fan of Slack (based on Electron) until I set it to run at startup. Before then I'd routinely have three Visual Studio instances, a SQL manager and Chrome running with 10 or 15 tabs open. No problem. Suddenly, I noticed my Windows machine would bog down with just one Visual Studio and take minutes to load Chrome. I was sure I had a virus.

Actually, Task Manager showed 90% of my 8Gb ram being utilized and caching to disk constantly with most of the ram and CPU being hogged by eight(!) Slack threads. This is with Slack minimized and sitting idle.

The fix was to replace the Slack/Electron app and use the browser version instead. That solved it.

Electron is a super cool piece of tech that could enable all kinds of great app development but needs to go on a serious diet first.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#112

Post by kk_cz »

zzalpha wrote: post #108
nextweek2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That image means nothing. Apps and the operating system cache lots of different things. If your system was under memory pressure then you'd see it lower. Fact is if the ram it available, an app should cache as much as possible. It has no idea what you'll need next, so better it use a free resource to reduce latency. You cannot think of an app in just terms of the text it handles but also window pixmap data.

Apps and the operating system cache lots of different things. If your system was under memory pressure then you'd see it lower. There's a problem, though: it doesn't work that way. The size reported by Windows is (if I'm not mistaken) the committed heap size of the program. Unless the application actively surrenders allocated pages back to the OS (and hint: no application does that), that memory is committed. Edit: t…

Don't know if it's relevant, but that screenshot is from macOS, not Windows.

Anecdotally: I am currently running VSCode and Task Manager reports 19,8 MB of memory usage right now (vscode Window being idle, with 6 files opened on Win10)

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#114

Post by vram22 »

nurettin wrote: post #110
candiodari wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great to hear that all of it is still alive. I was getting out my old Delphi I so enjoyed in high school but I found that while all my programs do still work on win10, the same cannot be said of the IDE (although Delphi 1 does work). So I had to put it in virtualbox in windows xp. Great nostalgic experience I must say. Back when I truly enjoyed programming just for the sake of trying something new.

There is a free version of XE 10.2 that works on windows 10 with a lot of the features cut. You can still write 32bit windows applications just like the old days: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/promotio...

Seems like they are naming the versions after cities nowadays (maybe were earlier too). E.g. 10, 10.1 and 10.2 are called Seattle, Berlin and Tokyo. Had tried out 10 Seattle and am using 10.1 Berlin some.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#115

Post by vram22 »

candiodari wrote: post #105
nurettin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have legacy software written in Delphi7 as well as newer web facing utilities and android applications (for customs and logistics personnel) written in Delphi XE7 and later. We get excellent third party support for oxml, secure blackbox, gnostice components, devexpress components, uniqui and many, many other libraries.

Great to hear that all of it is still alive. I was getting out my old Delphi I so enjoyed in high school but I found that while all my programs do still work on win10, the same cannot be said of the IDE (although Delphi 1 does work). So I had to put it in virtualbox in windows xp. Great nostalgic experience I must say. Back when I truly enjoyed programming just for the sake of trying something new.

>although Delphi 1 does work

Ha ha, I still have an old CD of Delphi 1 somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#116

Post by slededit »

zzalpha wrote: post #108
nextweek2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That image means nothing. Apps and the operating system cache lots of different things. If your system was under memory pressure then you'd see it lower. Fact is if the ram it available, an app should cache as much as possible. It has no idea what you'll need next, so better it use a free resource to reduce latency. You cannot think of an app in just terms of the text it handles but also window pixmap data.

Apps and the operating system cache lots of different things. If your system was under memory pressure then you'd see it lower. There's a problem, though: it doesn't work that way. The size reported by Windows is (if I'm not mistaken) the committed heap size of the program. Unless the application actively surrenders allocated pages back to the OS (and hint: no application does that), that memory is committed. Edit: t…

The size reported by windows is the private working set. If windows pages out data for non-use it doesn't show unless you add the commit column.
Post reply on HN