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Ode to the M1

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Re: Ode to the M1

#141

Post by satvikpendem »

zondafan1 wrote: post #28
mrd3v0 wrote: post #17

> Software "engineers" > For every extra cycle an hardware engineer can squeeze out of silicon, you will find a programmer adding one hundred cycles to their program[6]. In other terms, I fear that once devs figure out how powerful the M1 is, they will throw more "features" at it. Can we please stop replicating the "growth" fallacy into software ecosystems? Haven't we learnt enough about how unsustainable and damagin…

> I hope Electron/CEF die soon, and people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world. Web technologies are fine, but what we really need is some kind of lightweight browser which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS, but with far lower memory usage. I found https://ultralig.ht/ which seems to be exactly what I am looking for, but the license is a major turn off…

Tauri is somewhat similar to this, it's much lighter weight than Electron.

Re: Ode to the M1

#142

Post by wiseowise »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #74
speedgoose wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that you need a better alternative. I’m not aware of anything.

Godot? Targets Windows, UWP, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Android, iOS, and Web: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html Nothing says you have to use it to make a game. I recall seeing articles here on HN about using it as a cross-platform app development framework. GDScript may be less appealing than JavaScript, however.

How’s accessibility and access to native apis?

Re: Ode to the M1

#143

Post by OCASMv2 »

jb1991 wrote: post #67
bombolo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decent developers can do that in C++

Decent developers don’t leave comments like this about other developers.

On the contrary, decent developers should shame shoddy ones every chance they get. Maybe that would keep them from making horrible software that millions of people have to suffer every day.

Re: Ode to the M1

#144

Post by dasloop »

brailsafe wrote: post #131

I wish I could upgrade from my 13" mbp that's the last of the intel i5 series. My 16" M1 Max that I was issued at my last job was a dream, and now that I'm playing with SwiftUI and dealing with xcode, it's feeling slow and noisy. Unfortunately I was laid off, so no M1, and the ram upgrade to the 64gb or 96gb is insultingly expensive still. As nice as it is, it isn't a $4k boost in productivity.

$4k / ($your-total-cost * 3). Assuming 3 years of ownership. Tools are not only a laptop but the idea, I believe, is valid.

Re: Ode to the M1

#145

Post by satvikpendem »

winter_blue wrote: post #62
zondafan1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope Electron/CEF die soon, and people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world. Web technologies are fine, but what we really need is some kind of lightweight browser which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS, but with far lower memory usage. I found https://ultralig.ht/ which seems to be exactly what I am looking for, but the license is a major turn off…

What I'd really like to see with CEF et al, is JS being dropped, in favor of directly controlling the DOM from the host language. Then we could, for example, write a Rust (or Kotlin, Zig, Haskell, etc) desktop application that simply directly manipulated the DOM, and had it rendered by a HTML+CSS layout engine. Folks could then write a React-like framework for that language (to help render & re-render the DOM in an e…

Flutter does something like this, rendering on a canvas directly and eschewing HTML, CSS and JS altogether. It works pretty well. With WASM in the future though I suspect many other languages will adopt a similar paradigm.

Re: Ode to the M1

#146

Post by wiseowise »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #33
ramesh31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope Electron/CEF die soon, and people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world. Yes, so we can go back to writing a hundred lines of imperative code to render hello world.

4 in c. 11 in assembly. Not so bad, really. https://i.imgur.com/r2WRnZk.png

That’s super ironic that you’ve shown screenshot from a web application.

Re: Ode to the M1

#147

Post by OCASMv2 »

presentation wrote: post #43
mrd3v0 wrote: post #17

> Software "engineers" > For every extra cycle an hardware engineer can squeeze out of silicon, you will find a programmer adding one hundred cycles to their program[6]. In other terms, I fear that once devs figure out how powerful the M1 is, they will throw more "features" at it. Can we please stop replicating the "growth" fallacy into software ecosystems? Haven't we learnt enough about how unsustainable and damagin…

Keep hoping, because it won’t happen. Practically no consumers care except for other software engineers complaining loudly on HN, and meanwhile companies save millions by not handcrafting their CRUD apps in assembly.

The arrogance to believe that their software is so well written already that the only way to improve their performance is by using handcrafted assembly.

Just changing their high level data structures alone would yield 10x improvements, easily.

Re: Ode to the M1

#148

Post by satvikpendem »

wiseowise wrote: post #137
presentation wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep hoping, because it won’t happen. Practically no consumers care except for other software engineers complaining loudly on HN, and meanwhile companies save millions by not handcrafting their CRUD apps in assembly.

> Practically no consumers care except for other software engineers complaining loudly on HN, and meanwhile companies save millions by not handcrafting their CRUD apps in assembly. And you know that because you’ve analyzed whole market and know opinion of users of every web software? Definitely not because you only live in bubble of other software engineers so you’re not exposed to complaints of common folk?

No end consumers I know or even acquaintances of other people I know even know nor care about Electron. You might say that I'm in a bubble but at that point it's just the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Re: Ode to the M1

#149

Post by satvikpendem »

jrockway wrote: post #56
presentation wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep hoping, because it won’t happen. Practically no consumers care except for other software engineers complaining loudly on HN, and meanwhile companies save millions by not handcrafting their CRUD apps in assembly.

The problem is having to target 5 operating systems. Extremely complicated web app runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. Carefully-crafted Native UI widgets only target one platform at a time. If you want to get rid of Electron, you personally have to volunteer to be responsible for 5x the work of anyone else, and accept bootcamp-graduate pay. Do you see why it's not happening?

I just use Flutter instead, works great for all 5 OS.

Re: Ode to the M1

#150

Post by sneak »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #107
sneak wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned. Given inflation, the Macbook Airs are pretty crazy cheap. If they break you can just replace them. The base base low end M1 Air is only $1000 last I looked (and another $100 off for those in education). They're som…

Money is only part of the equation. It's pretty wasteful to have to toss a computer because one component failed, when that specific component would be replaceable in other brands.

This seems like a movement of the goalposts. I'm not that concerned about electronic waste, and I haven't seen any great arguments why anyone really should be.

It's not replaceable in other brands, because approximately no one is making a laptop remotely equivalent to the M1/M2. Perhaps the Surface Pro, but even that isn't a good comparison.

Remember when Apple made the first Air and it was so far ahead of every other laptop out there that Intel had to invent the term ultrabook to describe it so Asus and Dell could clone it? Yeah.

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