Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
by smokeyj on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @05:25PM
(#14092600)
The desktop is a dying platform, and if you're on it you can probably afford the overhead. From a global perspective if you're after accessability you'd be targeting the web and android. Both of which lend themselves nicely to react/react-native. And if you already have this architecture you can package it for desktop basically for free and integrate with the needed platform features that way, along with an upgrade strategy if you use react-native for OSX/Win.
If you consider hardware is a commodity and the cost of opportunity for replacing hardware instead of optimizing software is worth it, then formulate it better.
One may object by saying that the burden on hardware resources is higher because we consume more data, which is partially right. Although I don't intend to give a thorough objection here, please consider those two points:
- The payload fraction is larger in multimedia applications, for sure, but I can't see a reason why the "propellant mass fraction" equivalent in software should be bigger than it was, for example, 10 years ago. If we consider text-only data as an example, we notice that the propellant mass fraction increased as well.
- Higher level languages undeniably consume more resources by orders of magnitude; hardware frequencies must keep up by orders of magnitude as well.