Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by sjmulder on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @06:42PM (#16981795)

On Windows 10, Notepad uses 2 MB and Wordpad 12 MB. I'm quite surprised that the latter can fit a full, Ribbon equiped word processor in so little memory.

Not that I'd be concerned about a few tens of MB nowadays but on the whole we're consuming computing resources at the same rate faster hardware is put out (Gates' law).

I have a Pentium 3 running NT4 sitting on the same desk and it is faster at many tasks than my i5 workstation. Visual Studio 6 especially is super snappy. How then can Slack, on a machine with an order of magnitude more processing power and 64 times (!) as much RAM lag when switching channels?

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by richard_todd on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @06:52PM (#16981865)

I recently experienced Visual Studio 6 in a Win2k VM, and it was sickening how fast it was compared to modern tools. Same with Office2k apps, and all using an order of magnitude less memory. There has to be a better way than the path we are on, software-wise.

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by AHTERIX5000 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @09:28PM (#16982649)

It's ridiculous. I can launch a VM running Linux + X11 desktop environment from scratch faster than one of the most popular Electron apps launches & connects. Probably would run few apps in the VM well too with the same amount of memory.

Anything that could fix the current situation even a little bit like this project is much appreciated imho.

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by pjmlp on Thursday May 03, 2018 @12:53AM (#16983441)

It starts by avoiding touching anything Electron related.

This craziness just made me buy Sublime Text.

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by mighty_bander on Thursday May 03, 2018 @06:41AM (#16984728)

Well, we started prioritizing code cleanliness over everything else and throwing away good tooling because it was old. Blocking performance optimizations because they're "unmaintainable," or just not thinking about resource usage, is going to result in bad software.

I'd bet Slack, for example, has all sorts of abstraction and indirection layers in it, making it impossible to figure out the fastest way to do the job.

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by smt88 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @08:00PM (#16982208)

Visual Studio Code is pretty light and extremely responsive for me on 2012 hardware

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by airstrike on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @10:14PM (#16982861)

Hence why so many enterprise installs are still proudly running Office 2010.

I do wonder why nobody takes a stab at creating a bonafide Excel clone that looks modern and runs fast (and, no, LibreOffice isn’t good enough).

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by sgift on Thursday May 03, 2018 @07:55AM (#16985099)

Because writing an Excel clone which is "good enough" is really, really hard work, takes a really long time and you probably won't get away with "Let's do 80% in version 1 and then optimize" - People expect Excel. Not Excel lite. Especially if they have to pay for it.

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by airstrike on Friday May 04, 2018 @01:41PM (#16996513)

I’m not saying it’s easy, but in an age of so much disruption it’s honestly amazing how Excel continues to dominate. And I say this as someone who spends most of my waking hours in Excel...

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Re:Proton Native – React Native for the desktop by tluyben2 on Thursday May 03, 2018 @06:15AM (#16984642)

LibreOffice was written using an overachitected component system; it is very slow. Just writing something without the layers of abstraction would be refreshing.

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