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Why is Claude an Electron app?

dbreunig.com

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#411

Post by xigoi »

ajross wrote: post #410
xigoi wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe you can give ones of competing ones of comparable complexity that are clearly better? Thunderbird is a fully-featured mail app and much more performant than Gmail. Neovim has more or less the same feature set as VSCode and its performance is incomparably better.

> Thunderbird is a fully-featured mail app and much more performant than Gmail. TB is great and I use it every day. An argument for it from a performance standpoint is ridiculous on its face. Put 10G of mail in the Inbox and come back to me with measurements. GMail laughs at mere gigabytes.

Gmail takes tens of seconds to start up no matter how much mail you have.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#412

Post by ajross »

xigoi wrote: post #411
ajross wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thunderbird is a fully-featured mail app and much more performant than Gmail. TB is great and I use it every day. An argument for it from a performance standpoint is ridiculous on its face. Put 10G of mail in the Inbox and come back to me with measurements. GMail laughs at mere gigabytes.

Gmail takes tens of seconds to start up no matter how much mail you have.

Verifiably false. Like, this is just trivial to disprove with the "Reload" button in the browser (about 1.5s for me, FWIW). Why would you even try to make that claim?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#413

Post by xigoi »

ajross wrote: post #412
xigoi wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail takes tens of seconds to start up no matter how much mail you have.

Verifiably false. Like, this is just trivial to disprove with the "Reload" button in the browser (about 1.5s for me, FWIW). Why would you even try to make that claim?

Well, that obviously depends on the specs of your computer.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#414

Post by torginus »

danpalmer wrote: post #128
torginus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone uses Tauri - disk space is cheap but having to handle QA and supporting quirks for every possible browser engine the users' system could ship with certainly is not.

It's a RAM issue not a disk space issue. Binaries get loaded into memory. Also if you haven't heard, disk space is no longer as cheap, and RAM is becoming astoundingly expensive.

It's a RAM issue all right - browsers are set up in a multiprocess manner to allow sharing resources between tabs while sandboxing every single one.

So the footprint of the whole browser might be heavy, but each individual tab (origin) adds only a little extra.

Unfortunately both Tauri and Electron suck in this regard - they replicate the entire browser infrastructure per app and per instance, with each running just a single 'tab'.

And I share your concern for both disk space and RAM - but the solution here is to move away from browser tech, not picking a slightly differently packaged browser.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#415

Post by pjmlp »

ajross wrote: post #409
pjmlp wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode isn't a regular Electron crap application, in fact Microsoft has dozens of out-of-process plugins written in C++, Rust and C# to work around Electron crap issues, also the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL instead of div and p soup.

> Electron crap application Sigh. Beyond the deeply unserious hyperbole, this is a no-true-scotsman. Yes, you can use native APIs in Electron. They can even help. That's not remotely an argument for not using Electron. > the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL Right, because clearly the Electron-provided browser environment was insufficient and needed to be escaped by using... a browser API instead? Again, folks, t…

Because some developers are bloody lazy.

Gen X and Boomers strangely enough managed to write portable native code, across multiple hardware architectures, operating systems and language toolchains.

As is an insurmountable challenge apparently, to master Web UI delivery from system services, daemons to the default browser like UNIX administration tooling.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#416

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

selridge wrote: post #369
sarchertech wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s ignore electron. Your app has many UI/UX and performance flaws. If as your CEO says “coding is largely solved”, why is this the case? Or is your CEO wrong and coding is not largely solved?

APP BAD! If coding SOLVED HOW COME APP BAD.

I mean a software ide should be pretty low on the totem pole of software complexity.

Edit: (1) because most of the complexity lies in the tool chains that are integrated, like compilers and linters, and (2) because there’s much more complex software out there, mostly at the intersection of engineering domains, to name a few: ballistic guidance systems, IoT and networking, predictive maintenance systems, closed-loop process optimization systems, SLAM robotics

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#417

Post by afroboy »

blibble wrote: post #168
bcherny wrote: post #149

Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!

this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?

Like Warren Buffett said, Never ask your barber if you need a haircut.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#418

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #415
ajross wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron crap application Sigh. Beyond the deeply unserious hyperbole, this is a no-true-scotsman. Yes, you can use native APIs in Electron. They can even help. That's not remotely an argument for not using Electron. > the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL Right, because clearly the Electron-provided browser environment was insufficient and needed to be escaped by using... a browser API instead? Again, folks, t…

Because some developers are bloody lazy. Gen X and Boomers strangely enough managed to write portable native code, across multiple hardware architectures, operating systems and language toolchains. As is an insurmountable challenge apparently, to master Web UI delivery from system services, daemons to the default browser like UNIX administration tooling.

[deleted]

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#419

Post by LtWorf »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #136
yodsanklai wrote: post #34

Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.

I love the fact that we just got a model really capable of doing sustained coding (let me check my notes here...) 3 months ago, with a significant bump 15 days ago. And now the comments are "If it is so great why isn't everything already written from scratch with it?"

And you presume they are being completely honest about their capabilities why?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#420

Post by lkbm »

dude250711 wrote: post #206
bcherny wrote: post #149

Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!

> Finally, Claude is great at it. So the model is not a generalised AI then? It is just a JS stack autocomplete?

Claude isn't AGI, but this is a terrible argument. I'm better at Javascript than C, too. Does this mean I'm not a generalized intelligence? I'm just JS stack autocomplete?
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