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High-Level Is the Goal

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Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#81

Post by kukkeliskuu »

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…

Has somebody written an analysis why Qt really sucks? It would be great to have a spec for a GOOD cross-platform (desktop) UI framework. It might be also possible to create a reference implementation of that spec on top of Qt.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#82

Post by layer8 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #43
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.

I don’t think it makes sense to use the same framework for desktop and mobile apps. That gives you either terrible desktop apps or terrible mobile apps. Put the business/backend logic into a shared library, but build separate mobile and desktop apps on top of it.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#83

Post by layer8 »

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?

If you read to the end, the author does advocate for creating more high-level foundations.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#84

Post by layer8 »

IceDane wrote: post #42
highd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presumably the mobile apps works better; they don’t care very much about the website because they want to push everyone to the app anyway.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#85

Post by torginus »

nlawalker wrote: post #35

I really like the sentiment here, and Handmade Network has such a cool vibe, but I can't help but think that he/they would have a bigger impact by focusing more on illustrating to people how this mindset leads to value and less on teaching and learning the skills. >Building it yourself might sound crazy, but it’s been done successfully many times before—for example, Figma famously built their app from scratch in WASM…

Even 20ms is crazy, video games rendering and simulation entire worlds at 60Fps do so in 16.6 ms

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#86

Post by lordgroff »

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…

There's Lazarus / FPC. Fast, small. Extremely quick compiler. The language has its warts but very readable and relatively simple yet powerful. Uncool and treated like a relic though

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#87

Post by Nevermark »

noelwelsh wrote: post #60

A few thoughts: * These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op... . The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. t…

You think collapsing a comment quickly would be difficult in x86_64 assembly?

I would expect 1000's of frames of opens/closes per second. Probably an order or two more. The LCD's data bandwidth and our retina's sensitivity would be decisive bottlenecks at far slower speeds.

TLDR: CPUs, that are not getting slower, are not the reason newer software implementations often get slower.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#88

Post by Ericson2314 »

This is why I think the maximally from source bootstrap that Guix did, and that Nixpkgs is about to do too https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/479322 is so important.

These bootstraps essentially speedrun software history, and so they tell us a lot about how we got here, and why we write the things we write. But they also create perfect game to weite greenfield alternative bootstraps. The shortest, most readable bootstrap, is proof of the best abstractions, the best way of doing things.

It's a chance to finally put the sort of software stack / tech tree stuff on a more apples-to-apples basis.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#89

Post by torginus »

I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality to your goal in a way that is both economical and is very good at reaching the stated goal.

Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.

In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.

Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?

It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).

I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.

Re: High-Level Is the Goal

#90

Post by noelwelsh »

Nevermark wrote: post #87
noelwelsh wrote: post #60

A few thoughts: * These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op... . The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. t…

You think collapsing a comment quickly would be difficult in x86_64 assembly? I would expect 1000's of frames of opens/closes per second. Probably an order or two more. The LCD's data bandwidth and our retina's sensitivity would be decisive bottlenecks at far slower speeds. TLDR: CPUs, that are not getting slower, are not the reason newer software implementations often get slower.

Collapsing a comment is uneconomic in assembly. That's why we have higher level languages and other abstractions.

I think you missed the point of what I'm saying.

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