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Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

blog.johnnovak.net

21–30 of 177 posts

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#21

Wonder how the author didn't come across Qt or wxWidgets in his research?

I have the same question. There are many things that are problematic about Qt (personally, I loathe anything that feels the need to interject itself in the middle of the build process) but to completely ignore Qt without explanation - and subsequently post detailed experiences with libraries I've never even heard of - led me to believe the author exists in some uninteresting-to-me parallel plane of existence.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#22
post #19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA useful software that actually does something users want, rather than some kind of ascetic practice exercise. Yes, yes it does.

Well, not really. I hate on Electron not because of its size on disk, but its runtime memory footprint. Things like Skype in the background using 500MB, an Autodesk update notifier sitting silently in the tray using 350MB etc. all add up to a few GB of main memory you suddenly don't have. And these numbers are real, by the way.

That's kinda the fault of the developer. Electron itself isn't very large and I've seen very well crafted electron apps. The fact that slack uses 1-2gb memory is definitely on slack.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#23
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of "who cares" thinking gives us lazy bloatware like Electron.

AKA useful software that actually does something users want, rather than some kind of ascetic practice exercise. Yes, yes it does.

Earth's resources are not infinite, nor its ability to tolerate pollution.

Less importantly, my computer's resources are also not infinite. Yes, maybe your Electron app does something I want, but guess what, there are numerous other things I also want to do, and it is a bit silly that an IRC replacement now takes half of my computing power and manages to be less responsive than the stuff I used 20 years ago, in the computers of 20 years ago.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#24
post #12

Wonder how the author didn't come across Qt or wxWidgets in his research?

He jokingly mentions Qt in the caption of the final picture. I guess since he excludes GTK2 at the beginning for size concerns, wxWidgets and Qt would fall into the same category.

Making a Qt app smaller would mean statically compiling the app and stripping the libraries but, hey, there’s an angry blog post that needs to get written.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of "who cares" thinking gives us lazy bloatware like Electron.

AKA useful software that actually does something users want, rather than some kind of ascetic practice exercise. Yes, yes it does.

Electron doesn’t actually do what I want: I want apps that fit in with the rest of my system and don’t use excessive resources.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of "who cares" thinking gives us lazy bloatware like Electron.

AKA useful software that actually does something users want, rather than some kind of ascetic practice exercise. Yes, yes it does.

No, lazy bloatware like Electron isn't necessary to create useful software that actually does something users want. These two are independent of each other, you can create useful software that actually does something users want and still have it be lightweight on resources and fast.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#27
post #20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> If personal storage units were given away for free, you might argue that it doesn't make sense to organize your stuff, or remove stuff you don't need anymore, and you would be wrong. The least important reason to consider is to conserve disk and bandwidth; the most important is to reduce risk by reducing surface area. Small, sleek and efficient is mostly about reducing cognitive load, even if it had it's roots in m…

120 MB would be enough for me to choose an alternative to your application.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#28
post #11

What is this ridiculous obsession with executable size? How much time did this author spend chasing down alternatives to a measly 120MB? If they're working on art project then fair enough, but if they're working on a useful program then surely anything else they could have done with that time would have brought more value to end users than shaving off 3 cents' worth of disk space.

It's not ridiculous. We write off executable size as something that's irrelevant in an age where you can get a 4 TB drive for (what most of the HN audience would consider) peanuts, but it's not just disk space budget that's affected. Larger executables also mean:

- Longer start-up times (ridiculous things in 2019: a) SSD prices, b) the fact that it takes longer for an Electron todo app to load off a high-speed SSD than it took for basically the same application to load off my old Amiga's floppy drive)

- Fewer applications that you can run at the same time, higher chance of disk thrashing when resuming from suspend (bloated frameworks still have to make it to RAM, which yes, is also cheap and abundant, but load up a few VMs and see how abundant it seems then)

- Additional bandwidth used for delivering application updates

- Higher battery consumption if you use antivirus software and the like, because all those bits still need to be looked at.

- Sometimes it's just security theater, but not always -- a complex framework still has an attack surface even if your application doesn't use all of it.

These things save way more than a few cents' worth of disk space.

Re: Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)

#29

Wonder how the author didn't come across Qt or wxWidgets in his research?

exactly, unless he really has something super special, QT should fix all his jokes. I don't use QT, but I think QT rarely has competition as far as cross-platform desktop GUI is concerned.

the only true "cross-platform" alternative is electron, which is a bit bloated and slow, but vscode is built on it, along with many others and worked fine. I personally prefer electron these days.

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