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Native all the way, until you need text
81–90 of 328 posts
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#82Usually performance was the reason for using native APIs rather than web views, but this doesn't seem to be true any more. Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps. Meanwhile SwiftUI doesn't feel particularly fast. Apple's latest and greatest rewrite of System Preferences has dumbed down the UI to mostly rows of…
Well, maybe for simple web apps, but for complex applications there is a noticeable slowdown, I am not even talking about monsters such as jira, but well optimized apps such as vs code, there is a performance ceiling which is lower than for native apps.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#83I know nothing about any of these APIs, but the claim of the article seems weird. If naitive APIs are insufficient, or slow, or unsuitable, and implementing your own is too hard, then how does Electron even do what it does? One would assume that Electron has its own library to accomplish the task, in which case this code could either be separated, or re-created once and for all, into its own re-usable library.
Electron is just a thin shell around Chromium
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#84Usually performance was the reason for using native APIs rather than web views, but this doesn't seem to be true any more. Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps. Meanwhile SwiftUI doesn't feel particularly fast. Apple's latest and greatest rewrite of System Preferences has dumbed down the UI to mostly rows of…
SwiftUI, (but not specifically "SwiftUI", more of paradigm) is not the right tool to incremental changes of large portion of data, and SwiftUI specifically is very bad at it and offer no good API to make incremental changes more optimal. That's one of the reason behind why Apple to this day did not ship usable SwiftUI text view component.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#85I am currently experimenting with linux based GUIs. It was always something that felt clunky to me, but now with more insights, it's clunky for a reason. If you need more then a framebuffer, then rendering something sophisticated to the screen is insanely complex. Somehow it's easy to expect that rendering text on a screen should be easy, but when you go down the layers you find yourself with a club and a flint stone…
> Somehow it's easy to expect that rendering text on a screen should be easy
This is a common misconception among programmers, and is actually the opposite of the truth. Drawing arbitrary geometric shapes is easy, rendering text correctly is insanely difficult because ... humans.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#86If you're on macOS, WebKit is a native OS framework. Using WebKit to render Markdown seems completely appropriate. Now, if you're rendering everything with WebKit, that's ridiculous, in the same way rendering everything with PDFKit would be ridiculous. But for a Markdown view, WebKit seems like a logical choice. There's no need to subsequently flip the table and replace everything with a Chromium web app.
Yeah, this is actually my current in-progress solution: render the final Markdown & the streaming through WebKit. And yes, I agree: on macOS, WebKit is a native OS framework. In that sense, it is "native". But I think it also supports the broader point I was making: if you want to work with rich text, Markdown, selection, typography, and long-form formatted content properly, web technologies quickly become the only v…
> But I think it also supports the broader point I was making: if you want to work with rich text, Markdown, selection, typography, and long-form formatted content properly, web technologies quickly become the only viable option.
But, like, of course they are. This is what HTML was built for. The other major standard would probably be RTF, but it's a bit less structured, and so less close to Markdown. HTML is the better pick.
If you subsequently want to style that HTML, so that every second-level heading uses a specific font, and every third-level heading uses some other font, and so on, CSS is the best way to do that.
So, yes, we're saying the same thing, but to me it's a bit like saying "If you want to find the answer to 2 + 2, addition is the only viable option." Well, yes!
I think the reason this feels kind of wrong is because that same HTML and CSS renderer you're using for Markdown also comes with an entire 3D graphics pipeline and audio synthesizer. Obviously, we should be able to answer 2 + 2 without opening Mathematica.
I guess the important technical question is whether simply creating a WKWebView also loads in all that other stuff. I would hope and expect the OS is smarter than that, and you can call WebKit for simple HTML without everything else coming along.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#87Everyone loves to complain about the "bloat" in Chrome, but how many have actually taken the time to measure it against a native rewrite? Love this article. We take so much for granted in the modern WebKit/Blink stack. Modern multilingual text processing is a genuinely hard problem.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#88The problem here is that you are not choosing based on knowing how the render pipeline is implemented in these tools and how it would work with your usage of it.
You can do a couple days to a week of reading to understand the fundamentals once and then you will actually know what you are doing.
It is not proper to choose things on “battle tested” or other meaningless words
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#89I understand your pain. That’s why I’ve ported my VMPrint layout engine to Rust. It’s early, but it already shows promising performance improvements over the original TypeScript-based engine, which is already very fast. The Rust version can create fully paginated, publishing-grade layout at around 8,500 pages (or 2,000,000 words) per second on a M4 MacBook. It’s even faster at advanced tasks like mixing texts with irregular exclusion fields. The TS version can do it under 1ms, but I don’t have a measure yet for the Rust version. Unfortunately, people have shown little interest in this kind of components, so I’m no longer inspired to release it in its raw form like I did with VMPrint. My plan is to use it to build a native markdown editor first to test it more fully and just to have fun with it, LOL.
Re: Native all the way, until you need text
#90If you squint enough, you'll see the official Google doc app for Android/iOS is a webview (i.e the editor part)
Fancy text rendering/editing is hard to implement when you leave the luxury of webviews.