That depends. Many developers are now using Electron, .NET and other tech to develop software. Those are heavy and do not like old computers with limited resources."

My desktop products are made in Delphi (compiles to native code) and are very responsive and frugal on resources. Run fine on very old hardware. Desktop products done in C++ would be even better but I am not masochistic enough to develop GUI in C++. At least for now.

Is performance really comparable between .Net and Electron now? Neither is my specialty but anecdotally I see far more criticism of Electron for its slowness.

In theory .NET should be "better". In practice this really depends on way too many factors including how experienced were the programmers who implemented the software. In any way I am not an expert in this area.

I do use VS code as for some tasks there is no viable alternative for me and since my development workstation is a monster it runs fine. My own desktop apps however are native and I test them on really shitty hardware where one would not dream of running VS Code / Slack / whatever.

For fun I've compiled my main desktop product to 32 bit and it runs on a friggin old netbook just fine. Also from my point of view speed of development is not any slower when developing native applications. So unless client specifically requires it or I am doing some front end in browser my desktop apps are all native and coded in Delphi/Lazarus and my backends are C++.

I doubt you'll see any performance difference between Delphi and C++ (even with the most optimizing C++ compilers) outside of heavy number crunching anyway.

For whatever reasons most of my software (desktop and servers) ends up having this "heavy crunching" part in it be it. I usually do not create products that only serve as a simple conduit to a database.

Neither do i (in fact i use Delphi and Free Pascal for practically decades now and i never touched a database :-P) - most of my stuff are graphics and geometry related and yet i haven't seen much of a difference between my C or C++ and my Free Pascal (which AFAIK has worse optimizations than modern LLVM-based Delphi) code. Of course i refer to optimizations based on the generated code, algorithmic optimizations are another topic.

The only time i saw a difference when i made a raytracer benchmark[0] explicitly to benchmark the codegen where the Free Pascal codegen at its best was at 177% of the speed of the Clang 8 at its best. In my experience this is not a realistic metric though (according to the benchmark my C 3D engine should be five times slower if compiled in BC++ than Clang but in practice since it does a variety more stuff than just a single thing the performance difference is barely perceptible).

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/raybench/

Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first?

Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it.

How is this news?

In a lot of cases new software isn't delivering utility over old software, yet consumes more resources. Users justifiably feel miffed that they're expected to buy new hardware merely to keep up.

There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too. The problem aren't more ressource itensive features not possible before, but delivering a services we have for decades with way worse ressource usage because you can.

> There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too

Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....

Maybe referring to Ripcord. I haven't used for Slack though, I don't know what Slack's position is on third-party clients - using them with Discord is liable to get you banned.

Ripcord is the most advanced, SailSlack for SailfishOS and lots of CLI clients.

> Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first?

People are expected to run modern software for reasons of security, to retain interoperability with the latest standards, or to reduce support costs for the vendor. It is not very surprising that people don't want to upgrade their hardware for reasons that are outside of their control.

"Deal with it" ? How is that an argument? Things are getting worse and it should not be a problem then? If software is getting more complex, what kind of feature is it bringing or adding? I mean it's not more complex without a good reason.

If you quote Moore's law, let me quote Wirth's law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law