Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

Post by jart » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

fao_ wrote: post #87

andylynch wrote: post #59

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Even putting that aside, just showing text on a screen is much slower on modern PCs then older ones, since you have a far more complicated graphics stack and latency at several added steps. I remember an article a couple of years ago where someone rigged up a camera to measure key press to screen update on different machines and the results were eye opening. edit: found it http://danluu.com/input-lag/ . The Apple ][…

Related, my favourite thread to come out of the queer tech circles: "Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983" https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/927593460642615296.html

Post by tshaddox » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

setr wrote: post #44

afavour wrote: post #24

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That blog post does speak to me, but 20MB for a program with a truly functional, modern UI doesn't outrage me that much. IMO there's a tradeoff: we could be writing all our programs in C, still. But it would be enormously difficult and there'd be way more bugs. On the other end of the spectrum we can be lazy, use web tech everywhere and never optimise our ballooning JS codebases. This feels like it's at least somewhe…

However, most of that should be done in the background — it shouldn’t affect your actual text input speed. Auto-format is more along the lines of something that could be blocking, but we’re not dealing with latex problems as to be significant

Post by badsectoracula » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #132

badsectoracula wrote: post #130

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> RAM is cheap and plentiful. If you don't use it, its value is almost zero (the "almost" comes from OS-level caching of files and CPU-level cache misses of code). I have fond memories of my DOS days and the simplicity inherent in a single tasking environment, however nowadays operating systems allow for more than a single application to run at the same time and each application should play nice with the system resou…

>and each application should play nice with the system resources, so even if RAM is cheap and plentiful it doesn't automatically mean that every application should feel entitled to it. Yes, you shouldn't be a bad neighbor, but the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary. RAM is an afterthought for most of these applications for a reason. This attitude is like buying a sports car and never…

Post by kuschku » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

jart wrote: post #37

ComputerGuru wrote: post #11

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I saw Qt and immediately understood what you were trying to say, but for the record: That’s not what native means. Native means “uses the platform widgets and drawing/theming api” and Qt is not native: it actually draws its own widgets (for the most part with certain exceptions on certain platforms) that are drawn to mimic the system UI with subtle differences. If the system UI implementation suddenly changes (say wi…

Yeah but Qt does it well enough that I consider it de facto native. It's not like Swing Java where they totally went their own way with the widgets.

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #112

fouric wrote: post #94

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20 MB is less than 0.25% of my desktop machine's memory, and 2% of a 2010-era netbook. 20 MB, while much larger than what it has to be, is tiny even by the standards of decade-old computers. RAM is cheap and plentiful. If you don't use it, its value is almost zero (the "almost" comes from OS-level caching of files and CPU-level cache misses of code).

> If you don't use it, its value is almost zero Yet if you use all of it, its value is also zero - to every other program on the same computer. Don't be a dick; Use what you need, not all you can.