531–540 of 777 posts
We’re a very unique niche software that could be design online only, some have, but they slowly fail.
I will come at this from a different, philosophical perspective: Web apps come from a tradition of engaging the user. This means (first order) to keep people using the app, often with user-hostile strategies: distraction, introducing friction, etc. Native desktop apps come from a tradition of empowering the user. This means enabling the user to accomplish something faster, or with much higher quality. If your app dis…
What a perfect HN reply. Webapp bad. Native good. No justification. Just a bunch of generalizations. Gmail empowers me. Wikipedia empowers me. Github empowers me. Of course native application are important. You don't need to rely on those moralistic justifications.
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In my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lighter. Even IntelliJ and family - supposedly the state of the art in Java apps - feel like mud on a brand-new 16" Macbook Pro.
I've definitely noticed the same on IntelliJ but weirdly enough Eclipse feels just fine. IIRC both are written in Java, so maybe it comes down to the design of IntelliJ moreso than the limitations of the JVM?
Fast-forward 5 years and I've been doing JS in VSCode for a while. My current company offered to pay for Webstorm so I gave it a try. Lo and behold it was still sludgy, but now unbearable to me because I've gotten used to VSCode.
The one other major Java app I've used is DBeaver, which has the same problem to an even greater degree. Luckily I don't have to use it super often.
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And Winamp is 4MB (after removing the stock plugins that I don’t need, like modern skins and the long-broken media library internet lookup stuff). How big is Spotify now?
Spotify is 273MB (on Linux at least), 70MB for the binary and 137MB for Chrome, plus some other bits and bobs. $ pacman -Qi spotify Name : spotify Version : 1:1.1.10.546-4 Description : A proprietary music streaming service Architecture : x86_64 ... Installed Size : 272.79 MiB So at least it's smaller than Slack.
Have you tried compressing videos professionally or producing 3D content without a native app?
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There is movement away from stop-the-world GC, but not to reference counting. The movement is towards better GC. The language Go has sub millisecond GC with multi-GB heaps since 2018. See https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote Java is also making good progress on low latency GC. Reference counting can be slower than GC if you are using thread safe refcounts which have to be updated atomically. I don't want to have to th…
Go achieves those low pause times by allocating 2x memory to the heap than it's actually using. There's no free lunch with GC.
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Agree 100%. I wonder how much memory management affects this. My journey has been a bit different: traditional engineering degree, lots of large Ruby/JS/Python web applications, then a large C# WPF app, until finally at my last job, I bit the bullet and started doing C++14 (robotics). Coming from more "designed" languages like C#, my experience of C++ was that it felt like an insane, emergent hodgepodge, but what imp…
There is movement away from stop-the-world GC, but not to reference counting. The movement is towards better GC. The language Go has sub millisecond GC with multi-GB heaps since 2018. See https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote Java is also making good progress on low latency GC. Reference counting can be slower than GC if you are using thread safe refcounts which have to be updated atomically. I don't want to have to th…
I get the feeling that the industry is finally starting to realize that GC has been a massive mistake.
Memory management is a very important part of an application, if you outsource that to a GC you stop to think about it.
And if you don't think about memory management you are guaranteed to end up with a slow and bloated app. And that is even before considering the performance impact of the GC!
The big hinderence has been that ditching the GC often meant that you had to be using an old an unsafe language.
Now we have rust, which is great! But we need more.
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> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times. I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren't "written 6 times" - and write a few, including a music & other things sequencer ( https://ossia.io ). Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegr…
In my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lighter. Even IntelliJ and family - supposedly the state of the art in Java apps - feel like mud on a brand-new 16" Macbook Pro.