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Web apps are better than no apps

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Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #40
paulgb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway I think there’s some selection bias in this; the apps that get built as web apps tend to be the ones that are not bottlenecked by JavaScript. For exceptions that are pushing the limits of performance, you’ll more often than not find Rust/C++ compiled to Wasm in the stack.

I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Maybe VSCode? But I don't know if any of the computation is happening on the frontend. People have been extolling the virtues of WASM to me for a while but I have yet to find a use for it where it improved the speed of development,…

Even those CRUD apps you and I use daily have substandard performance, as they get bottlenecked by amount of data they can process, in at least two major ways:

1. Code "fast enough" to manipulate a few things (say, listings) will not be fast enough to handle hundreds of them;

2. UI frameworks and components people use are designed to look nice for demo case, which is again few elements, and tend to choke under actual, real workload of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of elements.

Next time you see a website that paginates your results, like e.g. a store that shows you 20 results per page, look for a dropdown controlling the pagination threshold. See if you can bump it to 50 or 100 elements per page, and ask yourself, why do you dread doing so.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#72

Post by mft_ »

Did this 'article' make anyone else's antenna twitch?

Firstly, there's something about the combination of saying nothing new and adding very little opinion, plus a few writing/editorial oddities, makes me wonder if this is GPT-generated? Or at best, it's just comms copy from a non-specialist, banging something out in a hurry. (Noting that the author is COO of a 'communication agency'.)

Secondly, given how uninteresting the article to (at least, to a typical HN reader, IMO) why has it popped up onto the front page?

I'm genuinely interested what's going on here - just an anomaly, or HN gaming, or a sign of things to come?

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#73

Post by Gigachad »

nottheengineer wrote: post #10

I hate to agree with this. Web is the best way to cram loads of features into a limited amount of dev time. But still, whenever I use Teams, something like this happens: I click a button, nothing happens. I wait 10 seconds, because teams sometimes just needs a little longer. Nothing happens. I click the button again, it finally starts doing something. 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears. And every time it hap…

Teams is just shit. Discord is also a web app and works great.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#74

Post by chrismorgan »

coldtea wrote: post #69
chrismorgan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still quite the claim. Given the disadvantage that it starts at, JavaScript is astonishingly fast, due to the extreme investment in it that you mention. However, in almost all real-world scenarios, it’s still generally pretty easily beaten by ahead-of-time-compiled languages, even if on some microbenchmarks and for a few specific sorts of tasks it can end up competitive with certain of these compiled languages.

> However, in almost all real-world scenarios, it’s still generally pretty easily beaten by ahead-of-time-compiled languages The claim to be refuted was not "Javascript is faster than AOT compiled languges" however. Instead, the claim was: "[Javascript is] around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled", which is not far off. Especially given that these two are not in general among the fastest kids…

Yeah, what I expressed was a bit sloppy. Go is AOT-compiled, but kinda the weak link among most such languages as regards performance. Java is somewhere in between the two, and the HotSpot JVM is also generally handily faster than JavaScript engines (it also has had rather a lot of effort put into optimising it, and without most of the starting disadvantages of JavaScript).

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#76

Post by J_Shelby_J »

mozey wrote: post #42

Instead of wrapping the application with something like Electron, why not install as a service and connect to a localhost port using your default browser? I know this is not the same UX as installing an app. But why isn't this technique more standard? Besides more efficient resource usage, another benefit is that it keeps the client/server architecture.

Hrmmm I wonder if you could do this on mobile.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#77

Post by MichaelZuo »

coldtea wrote: post #54
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Maybe VSCode? But I don't know if any of the computation is happening on the frontend. People have been extolling the virtues of WASM to me for a while but I have yet to find a use for it where it improved the speed of development,…

> I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Figma Teams (the web version) Outlook (the web version) MS Word (the web version) MS Excel (the web version) Google Documents Google Sheets Google Earth (similarly the iCloud versions for Pages, Numbers, etc) Canva Lightroom (the…

Google Sheets is a big one. It really does seem like CRUD when compared ti Excel.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#78

Post by AshleysBrain »

paulgb wrote: post #34
endisneigh wrote: post #16

> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…

> For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway I think there’s some selection bias in this; the apps that get built as web apps tend to be the ones that are not bottlenecked by JavaScript. For exceptions that are pushing the limits of performance, you’ll more often than not find Rust/C++ compiled to Wasm in the stack.

We build a full game creation IDE and game engine which is entirely browser-based and almost entirely written in JavaScript (including all the performance-sensitive stuff), and the performance is ridiculously good[1]. You don't need WASM for good performance[2].

[1] https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1...

[2] https://surma.dev/things/js-to-asc/

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#79

Post by jeroenhd »

jasode wrote: post #28
nottorp wrote: post #9

Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.

>Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? A desktop app based on Electron-Chromium runtime has more integration options with the operating system. E.g. file system access, taskbar/Dock icon and notifications, runs in the background, etc. If a developer were to create a 100% pure web url app running locally on https://127.0.0.1/foobarapp.html -- ... they'd quickly run int…

That's great, but I don't know any Electron app that needs file system or task bar access. Notifications are a solved problem already and installing web apps from the browser is just a click away in all browsers (except Firefox), after which they run completely offline.

Chrome added a file system API for some reason, but every Electron based application I've used just used the standard prompt and it worked absolutely fine. Even things like live screen recording and P2P VoIP can be done from the browser now.

I'm sure there are plenty of applications that need Electron, but I'm having a hard time coming up with any.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#80

Post by foul »

mft_ wrote: post #72

Did this 'article' make anyone else's antenna twitch? Firstly, there's something about the combination of saying nothing new and adding very little opinion, plus a few writing/editorial oddities, makes me wonder if this is GPT-generated? Or at best, it's just comms copy from a non-specialist, banging something out in a hurry. (Noting that the author is COO of a 'communication agency'.) Secondly, given how uninteresti…

If it's GPT4, it would fool me. It IS bland in tone and quality, but to me it looks like human-generated for voicing over some clickbait Youtube video.
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