Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE • Hacker News Board

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#71

Post by tpush » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #16

lsiunsuex wrote: post #7

"Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud" Which means it's an Electron app - which means between this and Chrome, it sucks down tons of ram and processing power. Really hoping Nova from panic.com is as good as it looks / native MacOS app.

This Electron-bashing is getting rather old - it's possible to write crappy code on any platform. Yes, some Electron apps are resource hogs, but many are not. VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant , cross-platform IDE.

> VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.

VS Code is unable to scroll text without dropping frames on my MBP 2013. Meanwhile even Xcode is (graphically) smooth as butter.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#72

Post by gowld » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #70

jankeromnes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.

Yes but when someone mentions Eclipse all I can think of is that huge, slow, bloated, ugly IDE I was happy to flee from many years ago.

That's fine. They want people who appreciate Eclipse during these early stages, and young people who haven't used Eclipse before don't have preconceived notions.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#73

Post by nmfisher » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #69

sz4kerto wrote: post #11

I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.

The only thing remaining to have a complete developer experience on Windows would be to convince Apple to allow building of iOS apps on other operating systems.

As someone who has been cursing Apple’s abominably obnoxious attitude in this regard for the last few days, this would be music to my ears.

I think it’s never going to happen. It’s the complete antithesis of everything that Apple stands for as a company.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#74

Post by gowld » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

timw4mail wrote: post #63

Icathian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious here, how can an IDE be toxic? I haven't heard any such thing before.

Slow, memory hogging, and not that useful.

Modern devs prefer that to be a feature their language (JS), not their IDE.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#75

Post by gowld » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

lecunn wrote: post #58

throwaway8291 wrote: post #42

I've used Eclipse on and off and always found it to be a bit clunky. Unhelpful error messages coming from the fifty layers of abstraction you did not know about before. Back in the days, I always preferred netbeans - it was just more of a product, less of an exercise in object-oriented abstractionism. Today, I am a happy user of vim (and vscode, if I need to) - I left behind the heaps of design patterns, thankfully.…

I don't understand your comment. What does the IDE Eclipse have to do with Eclipse Theia?

People don't understand that one project can have more than one product.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#76

Post by ken » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

sam_goody wrote: post #61

jtdev wrote: post #54

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

Eclipse is known for being clunky, but at least it is _known_. It is also trusted. When I wrote my first Android app, it was the only practical way to write and test. Not sure if that has since changed (am no longer doing apps), but my guess is that a lot of people have Eclipse on their system. There is a saying that even negative publicity is still publicity. The most important thing that Theia needs to convince wou…

> Eclipse has been around forever, and is going nowhere.

That's true of everything, right up until the day it's gone. I heard the same thing about Borland. And Perl, Fortran, 1-2-3, Netware, Lycos, Blackberry, ... The history of computers is littered with brands which were once impossibly dominant, and now just a footnote.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#77

Post by diggan » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

kryptiskt wrote: post #10

diggan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's actually using VS Code as a base, but since VS Code is under a MIT license, I don't think you can say anyone would be able to rip-off VS Code. If they don't include the license from VS Code, you could say they break the licensing, but it'll be hard to argue that a copy/fork of a project with permissive license would be a rip-off.

I don't mean to say that they are doing anything illegal or unethical. It just looks cheap to post a screenshot that looks like pixel-perfect copy of VS Code. Don't these people have a vision?

Sorry, maybe my understanding of "rip-off" is wrong (not native English speaker), I always seen it as a synonym to "theft" but that might be wrong.

I think what they want to focus on is not the editor itself but rather everything around it and where it's run. In typical startups, you try to focus on your core product, so reusing the editor from another project makes sense, as they don't mind the details about the editor itself.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#78

Post by gowld » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

bb101 wrote: post #18

Contributors and adopters: Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

That's exactly the spirit of Free and Open Source.

VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#79

Post by gowld » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #56

zabil wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it? As an open source project maintainer, I don't think it's necessary or easy to do that. Project teams and maintainers have different goals and sometimes it's much easier to fork and evolve without stepping on each other's toes. I'd even say that's the strength of open sourcing software under the right license.

In the FOSS world, forking is traditionally considered a hostile action. GitHub normalized the name of the action "fork", but it's not the same thing. GitHub forks are part of the plumbing of their Pull Request metaphor and are not true forks. As long as you're submitting upstream and pulling down, you haven't "forked" the tree.

"fork is hostile" is a myth perpetuated by little Napoleons who want to to control how users use their software.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#80

Post by ken » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

jhasse wrote: post #37

bb101 wrote: post #18

Contributors and adopters: Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

"Hey Microsoft, we're trying to improve VS Code by moving it over to a not-for-profit corporation not under your control and completly removing the Visual Studio brand. What do you think?"

"We call that maneuver the 'Edge'."