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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#181

Post by rumad »

can16358p wrote: post #167

I think convenience is the keyword. Users (not us HN crowd, the rest of the world) don't want to struggle with installing software, most of them don't know the difference between Internet, Browser, or "app". They just open up "internet" and work on docs, and for 99% of the cases Google Docs works fine despite running in a browser that is much less efficient than a native "app". For most cases it's more than enough fo…

I also love to use and prefer native apps. But, in my case, I had to offer Google Docs to my dad. Because he wanted to transfer his doc file to his work computer to continue to work on it when he is at the office. So, I thought a web app might be good for him.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#182

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

Klonoar wrote: post #127
drewcoo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A select with thousands of options sounds like terrible UX. If the new frameworks make the problem blindingly obvious so that someone can actually justify fixing it, all the more reason to use those frameworks.

I can’t believe I’m arguing this, but: it actually might be fine UX? As long as they’re sorted and I can jump with the keyboard, that bare-ass drop-down is probably going to “just work” with default behavior. Anything further and we don’t know the intended use case for the element itself, but on the surface… it could be fine.

There's another condition for that: That you can predict the first few characters of what you want to select. This is rarely true of thousand-item dropdowns; you generally find yourself having to iterate through a bunch of hypothetical naming schemes. Sure, this could be averted with rigorous enforcement of some naming convention, but if you have the discipline to do that, you're probably not making thousand-item dropdowns.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#183

Post by Maxatar »

delduca wrote: post #110
BearOso wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can static-link in all of Qt. Just build Qt yourself. It can strip out all the things you don't need, even symbols from the libraries you do use, so your binary isn't going to be that big.

I do not think it is possible to have a commercial application, you have to pay Qt’s license.

You can statically link Qt in compliance with the LGPL. The LGPL only requires that users are able to substitute the LGPL'd portion of an application with an alternative and compatible implementation.

Using a shared object/DLL is the traditional way of doing so, but you can also accomplish this by providing the object files for your application to allow users to link their own substitutions statically.

The FSF explicitly permits this as documented here:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDyn...

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#184

Post by Aaron2222 »

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

> I have to buy developer accounts

The Apple Developer Program is only needed for macOS if you want to do sign your binaries or distribute through the Mac App Store. And you only have to pay Microsoft if you want to publish to the Microsoft Store (or use Visual Studio if you're a company that has more than 5 Visual Studio users, more than 250 computers, or more than $1 Million USD in annual revenue).

> buy certificates for signing binaries

Fair (though both Windows and macOS will run apps that haven't been signed, with more warnings of course).

> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason

Only if you use their stores (Mac App Store or Microsoft Store), and it looks like the Microsoft Store won't take any cut if you do your own payments and it's not a game.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#185

Post by api »

jwells89 wrote: post #160
api wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The native world also refuses to create a standard UI API, making everyone use either Qt or Electron because sorry writing it over again for each platform is a hard “no.” Not even big companies do that anymore.

Why would platform maintainers want to encourage the lowest common denominator apps that such an API would undoubtedly result in (as a standardized UI API by definition cannot leverage platform strengths)? Apps like that get made anyway but as it stands at least there’s a healthy crop of smaller/indie native alternatives which often best the behemoths in UI/UX. That would likely disappear with the addition of a stand…

They are already doing that. Everyone uses Electron now. A good common API would lead to much better results.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#186

Post by vnuge »

titzer wrote: post #168
mike_hearn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very platform specific. MacOS has had "containers" since switching to NeXTStep with OS X in 2001. An .app bundle is essentially a container from the software distribution PoV. Windows was late to the party but they have it now with the MSIX system. It's really only Linux where you have to ship a complete copy of the OS (sans kernel) to even reliably boot up a web server. A lot of that is due to coordination prob…

> A lot of that is due to coordination problems. The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and recompiled on the target machine because ABI compatibility and laying out the filesystem so that .so's could even be found in the right spot was too hard .

> Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code

Yup, and I vendor a good number dependencies and distribute source for this reason. That and because distributing libs via package managers kinda stinks too, it's a lot of work. Id rather my users just download a tarball from my website and build everything local.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#187

Post by anonymoushn »

tomsmeding wrote: post #88
alerighi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye: > I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster! Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse…

I think Windows taking 1 minute on SSDs is typical, and it takes like 40 if you want to use a spinning magnet

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#188

Post by tppiotrowski »

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason

Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#189

Post by anonymoushn »

constantcrying wrote: post #156
michelb wrote: post #90

In my MacOS Passwords I have ±3400 entries. A roughly 341KB CSV. Searching in that list in the preference panel or Keychain app is dog-slow on my M1 Pro Studio or on my M3 MacBook Air. How??

It seems obvious how you could make it slow. Just naively iterate over the entire series of objects looking up the name for each. This is the obvious low effort, low complexity solution. Of course you could make it fast, but that would take time and effort for a feature most people won't notice.

Your proposed solution would run in less than 1ms though.
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