Brings to mind Cstross' story about how he ended up writing scifi. At one point it involves pressing a massive proof of concept perl script for a UK online payment service into production, and keeping it afloat as companies and banks piled on.
Re:The iPad Mystery
by TheCoelacanth on Monday May 15, 2017 @01:51PM
(#14343548)
For many applications, it isn't financially viable to ever make them fast and memory efficient because compute time is just far, far cheaper than programmer time. Electron is perfect for that type of application.
Is that really true? I mean, is it cheaper to write programs using javascript and Electron than a native GUI? It's cheaper to port, I'll grant you, compared to something written to target a native GUI. But, hell, even java and flash had a better memory and CPU story than Electron.
EDIT: Ok, to expand on this. Running a small number (< 5) of Electron-based applications on my MBP with 16GB of memory feels like running the same number of instances of Eclipse circa 2005 on my shitty, cheap HP laptop. Nothing else can run alongside them because they're so memory/CPU hungry. But here's the thing, computers have gotten better since 2005. What's the rationale for such poor performance with these apps? my computer has 8x the memory today (maybe more) than that one had. The clock is up by 2-3x. Cores increased by 4x.
There's no excuse for this in final, deliverable products.
Re:The iPad Mystery
by TheCoelacanth on Monday May 15, 2017 @03:27PM
(#14344379)
> There's no excuse for this in final, deliverable products.
There is an excuse for it if you aren't willing to pay for faster software. Cheap is more important than fast for most software products.
I see something similar in the hobby hardware space. Everyone using microcontrollers (and some really powerful ones) for tasks like homemade smart lights. It's way overkill, but it gets the job done and done quickly. And as a hobbyist it's great because it's infinitely reusable. But that doesn't make it the right thing to use for a shipping product.