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Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#61

Post by jamil7 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #52
jamil7 wrote: post #31

> paired with the universal access that comes with being hosted in the cloud, in a datacenter near you. How is a locked down vm, that I don’t control, “near me” more convenient than the fast, portable computer in front of me that I can build apps anywhere on, even when not networked?

You don’t need a fast computer near you? Plenty of people like this model of development. I personally love being able to compile massive projects while sitting in front of a MacBook Air or iPad. It sips battery while churning away at a data center elsewhere.

> You don’t need a fast computer near you? Plenty of people like this model of development.

Not really, honestly, and I've tried it in the past. Maybe it's a lifestyle thing, I travel around a fair bit on the train and value being able to do everything from my laptop. With an M2 MacBook Pro I can also churn through big Swift/Rust/JS projects and with a local LLM installed and some offline docs it's pretty productive.

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#62

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #16

It's very strange how lately new Google product launches always seem to be gated behind waitlists or slow incremental rollouts. Back in the Gmail days that happened for genuine reasons like very real machine capacity constraints, the explosive popularity of the product and so on. But these days Google has so much machine capacity they sell it to other people, and an experimental IDE isn't the sort of thing that's goi…

[deleted]

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#63

Post by iKlsR »

andsoitis wrote: post #56
bhhaskin wrote: post #4

Fool me once Google. It will be shutdown 6 months later.

Worse. 6 years, projecting even more pain, remorse, and hate amongst the developer populace.

Destructive cycle

Shut down due to low adoption Low adoption due to fear of it being shutdown

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#65

Post by kinlan »

richij wrote: post #64
RockRobotRock wrote: post #53

Fuck google. Use GitHub codespaces + GitHub copilot + Vercel if this workflow is what you really want.

and what if my natural reaction was, "Fuck Microsoft"? What then?

Fuck y'all, all y'all?

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#66

Post by rglover »

It's deeply haunting to think of a future where new/inexperienced developers not only think this is normal, but a good idea.

This is a guaranteed path to making it so that shipping code or building a business is dependent on one of a few mega corps (who will happily shut you down, rip off your ideas, etc, at a moments notice).

"Only the paranoid survive." - Andy Grove

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#67

Post by RockRobotRock »

richij wrote: post #64
RockRobotRock wrote: post #53

Fuck google. Use GitHub codespaces + GitHub copilot + Vercel if this workflow is what you really want.

and what if my natural reaction was, "Fuck Microsoft"? What then?

My response would be, fair enough :)

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#68

Post by CRConrad »

vineyardmike wrote: post #52
jamil7 wrote: post #31

> paired with the universal access that comes with being hosted in the cloud, in a datacenter near you. How is a locked down vm, that I don’t control, “near me” more convenient than the fast, portable computer in front of me that I can build apps anywhere on, even when not networked?

You don’t need a fast computer near you? Plenty of people like this model of development. I personally love being able to compile massive projects while sitting in front of a MacBook Air or iPad. It sips battery while churning away at a data center elsewhere.

> You don’t need a fast computer near you?

Wasn't his point that he already has a quite-fast-enough computer much nearer; like, right in front of his nose? As do I; and, I wager, you.

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#69

Post by CRConrad »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #39

It would be nice if we didn't need this. It would be nice if we had a native(!) low-level GTK-like API on MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Windows has it but that's because Windows is ancient and backward compatibility is important, and no one has figured out how to ruin it without breaking backward compatibility yet.

> It would be nice if we had a native(!) low-level GTK-like API on ... Linux

Eh... GTK? (Or Qt?)

Re: Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development

#70

Post by CRConrad »

smokel wrote: post #35

The ignorance of many comments in this thread astound me. Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your p…

> A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.

You say that as if it were a God-given truth that that is how things must be, or maybe even as if it were a good thing that that is how things are. Which could hardly be further from the truth. The solution isn't to cover all that shit up with yet another layer of cruft, but to get rid of most of this fricking cruft.

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