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Web apps are better than no apps

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Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#131

Post by jwells89 »

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…

And unfortunately, in the world of electron apps there’s far more leaning in the direction of Teams than in the direction of VS Code.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#132

Post by epidemian »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #103
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…

> 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. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…

> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence.

There was this blog post of a company trying improve their clients' webpage performance by incrementally migrating them from JS to WASM/Rust: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html

In short, their idea failed. Those rewrites did not yield the "orders of magnitude" perf improvements that they were hoping for. A quote from the article:

> Rust is faster than JS in some cases, but those cases are rarer than we expected, and the performance gain is on the order of 2x some of the time, not 10x most of the time.

Having had a good deal of experience programming in JS, this doesn't surprise me. JS engines are extremely good at JIT optimizing, especially if you know what you're doing and give them code that's suitable for optimization (e.g. using mostly primitives and arrays, simple loops, avoid creating tons of intermediate data structures, etc).

IDK if any of this counts as "serious evidence". It's purely anecdotal really. But it's on par with the "evidence" presented as a counter to this.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#133

Post by amelius »

nsonha wrote: post #17
JimDabell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. When I use an app, I don’t care what it looks like on somebody else’s phone, I care that it works the same as all the other apps on my phone. > Give me consistency. I want it to be consistent with all the other apps on my phone. I don’t care if it’s consistent with what’s running on somebody else’s phone.

They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.

Yes, we have different interfaces on the web already, and nobody is complaining that the Gmail login button looks different from the Facebook login button on the web.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#134

Post by jwells89 »

HeckFeck wrote: post #22
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…

MSN Messenger really was never that bad, was it? I keep hitting the RAM ceiling on my 16GB dev machine with the amount of electron crap I have to have open just to send messages to colleagues. Maybe it isn't noticeable when your app is the only one developed on your machine, but on a typical user machine these days the RAM guzzling is real. We could have it better, we had it better and I hate this.

I remember using Adium on my iMac G5 with 2GB of RAM, with its ability to connect to numerous networks, tons of features, and deep customizability of every aspect of the program with themes, icons, sound sets, etc and it only ever took up a small portion of that 2GB, even though its message view was implemented with a webview.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#135

Post by amelius »

croes wrote: post #4
amelius wrote: post #2

> Such apps leverage the native platform’s interface, including windows, buttons, text areas, and everything else. They look right and familiar, and they behave this way. Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. Give me consistency. If I buy a phone of some different brand (or use the family tablet which happens to be of a different brand), give me the same interface for each app…

Most people use two platforms at most. Phone and PC, and these already look different because of the screen sizes and orientation. And a web app look rarely like the most used desktop apps people are used to: Excel and Word

Stuff looks different on the web everywhere, yet people know how to find their way around without any problems. On the web, Facebook has a different shape and color of login button than Gmail, but nobody's complaining.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#136

Post by DarkNova6 »

epidemian wrote: post #132
DarkNova6 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…

> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. There was this blog post of a company trying improve their clients' webpage performance by incrementally migrating them from JS to WASM/Rust: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html In short, their idea failed. Those rewrites did not yield the "orders of magnitude" perf improvements that they were hoping for. A quote from the article: > Rust…

Comparing WASM and JS is fine.

Claiming JS has the same performance as Java or Go is not.

JS also has had decades of optimizations. So if WASM with essentially no optimization is just as fast as JS, that's a huge interoperability win.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#137

Post by DarkNova6 »

paulddraper wrote: post #122
DarkNova6 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…

> JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And yet it has been optimized. > Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... JS is ~30% slower than Java or Go. Go is a lot closer to JS perf than to C++ perf. --- For real-world applications....…

I take these performance benchmarks with a rock of salt. They are mostly hyper-optimzied generics which are as far away from actual production code as it can be. They are written in a way to allocate as little memory as possible and is done by people who know exactly what they are doing.

Especially the garbage collection strategies of Java are second to none (sorry, don't want to be a shill).

> For real-world applications....compare IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio, or Sublime against VSCode. My experience is that VSCode has horrible input latency and Intellij is blazingly fast once indexing is done.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#138

Post by DarkNova6 »

fouric wrote: post #120
DarkNova6 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…

> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. Funny that you say "not even remotely close" while providing zero evidence yourself, but then ask other people to present their evidence. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... There you go. There's the evidence. No goalpost-moving, please. For evidence that Javascript can be used to build large, production-quality applica…

Speed is achieved via optimization, which is achieved via constraints. Javascript is being known for its inefficiency. Saying JS is just as fast is a hot take and whoever claims that has the burden to proof otherwise.

Sorry, about benchmarks I just quote myself: > I take these performance benchmarks with a rock of salt. They are mostly hyper-optimzied generics which are as far away from actual production code as it can be. They are written in a way to allocate as little memory as possible and is done by people who know exactly what they are doing.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#139

Post by layer8 »

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.

It’s more obscure for users if they have to open http://localhost:some_port/. You also have to decide on a hopefully free port.

As an aside, if the application isn’t careful, that approach can potentially open up a security hole, because external javascript on a web page in your browser can perform requests to localhost.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#140

Post by paulddraper »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #137
paulddraper wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And yet it has been optimized. > Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... JS is ~30% slower than Java or Go. Go is a lot closer to JS perf than to C++ perf. --- For real-world applications....…

I take these performance benchmarks with a rock of salt. They are mostly hyper-optimzied generics which are as far away from actual production code as it can be. They are written in a way to allocate as little memory as possible and is done by people who know exactly what they are doing. Especially the garbage collection strategies of Java are second to none (sorry, don't want to be a shill). > For real-world applica…

My experience is that IntelliJ takes way longer to start and freezes more frequently.
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