This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable o…
A couple of quotes from the article above:
"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."
"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."
It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.
C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?
Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?
I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.
Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.
Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.