71–80 of 147 posts
This might explain why, although I'm not a constant user of Mac, whenever I've had to use it, the UI has felt a little (and in the newer versions, significantly) more sluggish than Windows on the same hardware. It's not hard to see how someone accustomed to that level of responsiveness could find Electron not too different from a "native" app that's actually doing much the same thing.
I really hate reading HN comments involving anything with JS. Probably some of the lowest quality comment sections on the site.
This might explain why, although I'm not a constant user of Mac, whenever I've had to use it, the UI has felt a little (and in the newer versions, significantly) more sluggish than Windows on the same hardware. It's not hard to see how someone accustomed to that level of responsiveness could find Electron not too different from a "native" app that's actually doing much the same thing.
Wow. I always thought the argument in favor of using web technologies on the desktop was that cross-platform became easier. And yet here is an example of the most unambiguously single-platform app I can possibly imagine, and under the hood it uses web - and React of all things! Crazy.
A settings view that is largely shared between macOS System Preferences, iOS Settings and icloud.com is not single-platform. Windows Settings uses React Native for the same reason.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30384494 Edit: mention iOS Settings.
Why don’t those both use the same UI toolkit, like the convergent GNU/Linux DEs? (macOS seems to be getting more touch-optimized with each update — eg. making sliders giant and iOS-style; why hasn’t Apple merged Cocoa and Cocoa Touch into one yet?)
GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.
How about flutter? It uses native views.
Source-available variants of [GNU's Not] Unix have often been on the leading edge of user interfaces, from immitating the Xerox PARC desktop metaphor before Windows did (X11 initial release: June 1984, Windows: November 1985) to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released. But it’s interesting to see macOS’s proprietary UI now apparently following GNOME’s example of po…
Isn't this javascript but without web tech? That doesn't really stray too far from native anyways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This post is talking mostly about CSS and it shows a document object model tree. JavaScript is also used, given that he mentions React. Among these options, it seems that Rust is most similar to JavaScript. But this whole article would be the same if React was written with Rust instead. So what is the broken part of GUI development, and why is Rust positioned to fix it? As I see it, not much would change if we used R…
The broken part is that it is worth it to use an inefficient rendering method (lots of JS generated by React + an interpreter and GC + a render tree (React VDOM) + an overcomplicated element tree (DOM) + a rendering system) instead of an efficient rendering system (if React-in-Rust existed, it would be native executables manipulating an in memory tree for a renderer, removing at least two layers of complications). An…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As it turns out, React / CSS / the document-object-model are popular for more reasons than “it works on different computers.” Who knew!
I'd bet that the reason they're using React is because it's cheaper and easier to find front-end developers for the task.
Have we considered asking why it’s so much easier to find React devs? Why such a huge, huge majority of UI development today takes place on the web?
I’m a front end web developer. I’m very biased.
But I’m a little tired of the narrative that “the right way to make a UI is to build it natively, but everyone wants to take the easy way out.”
Perhaps the explanation is that native GUI frameworks simply haven’t kept up in terms of developer experience. And if you spend some time exploring them, I think that becomes very obvious very quickly.