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High-Level Is the Goal

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Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#41

Post by cjfd »

Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.

E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....

Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#42

Post by IceDane »

highd wrote: post #22
jbritton wrote: post #19

The Reddit example is about two different design choices. The DOM is a tree of state that needs to stay in sync with your app state. So how to make that happen without turning your code into a mess. The old Reddit had to first construct the DOM and then for every state change, determine what DOM nodes need to change, find them and update them. Knowing what needs to change gets ugly in a lot of apps. The other alterna…

I'm fairly confident that the new reddit React implementation can be improved in performance by a factor of 3x to 10x. I would be interested to hear others who have good reason to explain why not. I can certainly imagine React-like systems that are capable of statically determining DOM influence sufficient to make comment-collapsing negligible.

It is blatantly obvious to anyone with just a little bit of experience that the reddit devs barely know what they are doing. This applies to their frontend as well as backend. For some reason, reddit is also the only major social network where downtime is expected. Reddit throwing 500 errors under load happens literally every week.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#43

Post by DeathArrow »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #11

I think the real conclusion is: someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck. (Yeah Qt exists, but it really sucks...) Until then, everyone will default to just using the browser for a desktop app, and the beatings will continue. Because of this, I'm really looking forward for PanGUI to step up ( https://www.pangui.io/ ), their UI framework is very promising and I would start usi…

PanGUI seems to be interesting. However being mobile ready would matter a lot for adoption and I couldn't see anything on their sites regarding mobile platforms.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#44

Post by physicsguy »

rubenvanwyk wrote: post #24

So from what I understand… Someone needs to build Qt’s successor, probably with more beginner-friendly declarative semantics (akin to HCL or Cue) and probably with syntax closest to YAML or Python (based on learning curve, beginner readability etc). The backend will probably have to be something written in Zig (likely) or Nim (capable, less likely) and will probably have to leverage OpenGL/Metal, WebGL and WASM. Obvi…

QML isn’t that different anyway from what you describe

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#45

Post by DeathArrow »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #28
rubenvanwyk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of PanGUI - glad to see its C#, will have to try it out.

They're making the initial version with C#, but they have plans to make the library language-agnostic. Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.

>Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.

It sounds like a clever idea.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#46

Post by DeathArrow »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #31
ragall wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all. That's not consensus. I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that. It force…

> I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that. Yes, that is the consensus of why Qt sucks - it's a massive framework that tries to do everything at the same time with a massive toolset of in-house libraries. This is inherently tied to the revenue model of the Qt Company - sell custom modules that work…

>That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha

They say it's in beta and it seems anyone can sign up for the beta.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#47

Post by tristenharr »

Really enjoyed reading this. Stuff like this is what inspires me to keep pursuing logos language and theorem prover. Things on the roadmap next include stuff like adding first-class inline ASM support. Adding great SPMD and auto-vectorization pipelines, and exploring making verifiable private computation a language primitive when you make things private. If interested, read about some of the planned upcoming enhancements here. :) https://github.com/Brahmastra-Labs/logicaffeine/issues

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#48

Post by [deleted] »

B4CKlash wrote: post #8

I enjoyed reading this article but I think the author overlooked that "low-level" languages aren't just less supported, they're also character-dense. You can accomplish more with less, simply because it's a higher level abstraction. If you choose to abstract through this problem, aren't you creating a high-level language?

[deleted]

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#49

Post by Escapado »

Sevii wrote: post #39

He makes an interesting point that we are coding programs that run more slowly now than they did 10 years ago. Javascript has only gotten faster over the last decade, computer have faster CPUs and more RAM. The problem is the frameworks and the programs have gotten slower. What did we gain exactly? Reddit is better at displaying videos and images now. But it's slower despite faster hardware.

I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#50

Post by jakkos »

jbritton wrote: post #19

The Reddit example is about two different design choices. The DOM is a tree of state that needs to stay in sync with your app state. So how to make that happen without turning your code into a mess. The old Reddit had to first construct the DOM and then for every state change, determine what DOM nodes need to change, find them and update them. Knowing what needs to change gets ugly in a lot of apps. The other alterna…

We measure computer performance in the billions and trillions of ops per second. I'm sorry but if it an app takes 200ms to hide some comments, the app or the tech stack it's on is badly made.

> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.

Hugely multiplayer games consistently update at under 16ms.

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