Goodbye, Native Apps

#1

Post by delvin0 » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 5:45 AM UTC

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#2

Post by juststeve » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

Or native apps will go through a revival due to new languages, compiler optimizations and access to intrinsics and C libraries.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#3

Post by mikewarot » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact.

It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of programmers out there are newer than me and don't have knowledge of this type of efficiency to compare against.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#4

Post by Fizzadar » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

I don't think it's impossible to have (relatively) lightweight hybrid apps. The article focuses entirely on electron, which ships a whole browser. There are other options, such as pywebview, that use the system native browser. Still means the underlying JS bundle has to perform, which goes the same for websites too.

That said, I normally seek native apps where possible (ripcord for slack, sublime), but that's also pretty hipocrytical of me ref Kanmail!

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#5

Post by wademealing » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

I feel like writing a 'goodbye goodbyes' medium piece which talks about never listening to a 'goodbye' article again.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#6

Post by schwartzworld » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 9:59 AM UTC

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#7

Post by danmur » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #6

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

I haven't compared ram usage but vscode feels (subjectively obviously) very slow by comparison to me. Intellij is a beast of an application in terms of features also.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#8

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #3

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact. It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of progra…

You have to thank Borland's management for that.

Delphi and C++ Builder are still around, but now only some lucky enterprise employees get to play with them.

.NET Native and C++/CX were finally shaping up to be Microsoft's proper version of what .NET and Visual C++ should have been all along.

However they are the most recent victims of the whole Reunion reboot, .NET Native now has uncertain future, while C++/CX got replaced by C++/WinRT with a tooling at the same level as doing C++ ATL 2.0 in 2000.

Still, there is a certain guarantee of the underlying platform and respective languages being around.

Borland mismanagement was my hard lesson to only use tools from platform vendors. Not only did they decide to leave the indie developers, they were always late providing bindings to Microsoft SDKs.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#9

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #6

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

Nope is a very quite good example, because one can compare it to Emacs, vim, Sublime Text loaded with a similar set of plugins.

And it isn't an IDE, rather a programmer's text editor.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#10

Post by karmakaze » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

juststeve wrote: post #2

Or native apps will go through a revival due to new languages, compiler optimizations and access to intrinsics and C libraries.

Technology still matters. It's not native vs not-native, there are many points along this scale. An app written in Swift on an iPhone should run faster than a similar app in Java on Android. If they run about the same, remember that the iPhone can do it with less memory and battery consumption. The Java Android app is more native than a React-Native app executing js.