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Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#641

Post by neutronicus »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #616
Insanity wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, how much RAM did you have before, and what did you upgrade to? I recently got a new PC myself and decided to go for 16GB, my previous one (about a decade old) had 8GB and I didn't feel I really hit the limit, but wanted to be future proof. Because as you said, a lot of 'modern' applications are taking up a lot of memory.

I also went from 8GB to 16GB recently (virtual machines are hungry); but I had gotten rid of Slack even before that. I mean, yes, it has round edges and goes ping and has all those cutesy animations - but 2GB of RAM for a glorified IRC client, excuse me, what exactly is it doing with billions of bytes worth of memory? ("Don't know, don't care" seems to be its developers' mantra)

The answer is JIT'ing JS.

For each of your Electron apps there is a little compiler chugging away.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#642

Post by fxtentacle »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #627
mrweasel wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick? People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.

Totally agree. But the DRM monster rears its head. Everyone is afraid you'll steal their choons if you're allowed to play them on whatever player you like sigh

Still, all iTunes content can be de-DRM-ed in 500 lines of C code, so it's not like "the industry" actually requires it to be secure.

Like everything these days, it's barely good enough. And why bother implementing your DRM as a 1KB C++ library when you can use a 5MB Objective C framework instead?

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#643

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

atombender wrote: post #337
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my days of Windows-exclusive computing, I wondered what people meant by native UIs, and why do they care about them. My wondering stopped when I discovered Mac OS and, to a lesser extent, Ubuntu (especially in the Unity days). Windows, with its lack of visual consistency, looked like a hot mess compared to the aforementioned platforms. And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infini…

I don't know exactly what time period you're referring to, but back when Java was attempting to take over the desktop UI world with Swing, it was painfully obvious when an app wasn't native on Windows. Eclipse was the first Java app I used that actually felt native, thanks to its use of native widgets (through a library called SWT) instead of Swing.

As far as I know, you can even write your own applications based on SWT which would make jvm apps pretty consistent and performant across platforms, but not many people seem to have chosen that route for some reason.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#644

Post by fxtentacle »

nv-vn wrote: post #515
Decade wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking back at the past with rosy goggles. What I remember from the time was how you couldn’t run that many things simultaneously. Back when the Pentium II was first released, I even had to close applications, not because the computer ran out of RAM, but because the TCP/IP stack that came with Windows 95 didn’t allow very many simultaneous connections. My web browser and my chat were causing each other to er…

It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new fe…

We gave it up for slightly higher profit margins enabled by hiring slightly less qualified programmers at a slightly lower rate.

In a similar vein, Industrial Light and Magic used to have a few highly talented people crafting incredibly intelligent solutions to make their movies possible: https://youtu.be/AtPA6nIBs5g

By now, most of those effects would instead be done using CGI and outsourced to Asia.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#645

Post by icebraining »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #605
slightwinder wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That doesn't mean we should be wasting it to do the same or even less functionality we had with the machines of 10 or 20 years ago. If we save developer-cycles, it's not wasted, just saved somewhere else. In the first place we should not go by numbers, because there always will be someone who can complain for a faster solution. > For example, IM, v…

> If we save developer-cycles, it's not wasted, just saved somewhere else. In other words, pass the buck to the user (the noble word is "externality").

No, an externality is when a cost is passed to a external party (not involved in the transaction), like air pollution or antibiotic resistance. Passing a cost to the user is just a regular business transaction, like IKEA sending you a manual so you can build the furniture yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#646

Post by 0xkd »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #193
burke wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.

My personal evolution has gone from Sublime Text 3 to Atom to VS Code to Sublime Text 3. I've never been a heavy plugin user, mainly sticking to code highlighting. The thing I really like is speed. Sublime Text rarely chokes on me. I love being able to type `cat some_one_gigabyte_file | subl` and getting it to open up with little difficulty. VS Code chokes on files of non-trivial size, and that was the thing I liked…

> Complete list of AWS pricing for every product in every region stored as JSON

Is this a hypothetical file that you mention or something you actually have? Asking since I have a use-case for this data and am interested in knowing how to get it. I have read AWS has APIs for pricing info - is that where you got the data from?

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#648

Post by roca »

pjmlp wrote: post #561
roca wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Rust, so no double frees and no accidental forgetting to call free(). Of course you can still have memory leaks, but that's true in GC languages too.

That is not manually memory management though, and it also comes with its own set of issues, like everyone that was tried to write GUIs or games in Rust is painfully aware of. There is no free lunch no matter what one picks.

That's true. The comment by mlwiese up-thread, that I responded to, praised Go's low GC latency without mentioning the heavy memory and throughput overheads that come with it. I felt it worth pointing out the lack of a free lunch there; I think a lot of casual Go observers and users aren't aware of it.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#649

Post by theandrewbailey »

neutronicus wrote: post #641
Piskvorrr wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also went from 8GB to 16GB recently (virtual machines are hungry); but I had gotten rid of Slack even before that. I mean, yes, it has round edges and goes ping and has all those cutesy animations - but 2GB of RAM for a glorified IRC client, excuse me, what exactly is it doing with billions of bytes worth of memory? ("Don't know, don't care" seems to be its developers' mantra)

The answer is JIT'ing JS. For each of your Electron apps there is a little compiler chugging away.

Back in the day, we didn't have 2GB of RAM total, much less just for a compiler!

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#650

Post by rightbyte »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #638
thdrdt wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources. Another program I use a lot is Blender (3D software). Compared to Spotify and Slack it is a crazy complicated program with loads of complicated functionalities. But it starts in a blink and only uses resources when it needs to (calculations and your 3D model…

> I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and S…

Maybe we need a power declaration of software as with dish washers. (No joke)
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