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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

I’m fine with that tradeoff. For people who need network rendering, they can pay a performance penalty when they use it. For the 99% of people who 99% of the time don’t use this feature, we aren’t paying the performance (and architectural complexity) cost of this.

Electron is panned by many these days for requiring an expensive network system for a local process. Why doesn’t X11 get the same scorn? Have we forgotten the days when a Mac could run a GUI in 128K while a Unix system struggled to run x11 (with no clients) in 4MB? X is heavy.

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In the late 80's, context switching was so slow and local area networking was fast enough that it was sometimes actually snappier to run your xterm or emacs on another system over the local network, than both on the same workstation.

That's because running over the network didn't require ping-pong context switching back and forth between the X11 server and the client at every keystroke, so both client and server could run smoothly without getting switched out.

The X protocol is so chatty and ping-pongy that it could require several context switches per keystroke to handle the event and update the screen, when running both server and client locally!

> Electron is panned by many these days for requiring an expensive network system for a local process. Why doesn’t X11 get the same scorn? Have we forgotten the days when a Mac could run a GUI in 128K while a Unix system struggled to run x11 (with no clients) in 4MB? X is heavy.

If you actually properly understood both the argument you're making and the reason why most people dislike Electron and friends, then you'd not be making that argument. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're joking.

Actually, Electron (and most other web browsers) on the Mac OS/X and iOS use IOSurface to share zero-copy textures in GPU memory between the render and browser processes. Android and Windows (I presume, but don't know name of the API, probably part of DirectX) have similar techniques.

It's like shared memory, but for texture memory in the GPU between separate heavy weight processes. Since simply sharing main memory between processes wouldn't be nearly as efficient, requiring frequent uploading and downloading textures to and from the GPU.

Mac OS/X and iOS IOSurface:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iosurface?language...

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/08/mac-acc...

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS/blob/master/notes/IOSur...

Android SurfaceTexture and GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Sur...

https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/OES/OES_E...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J0fkaGS9Gseczw3wJNXvo_r-...

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS/blob/master/notes/ZeroC...

https://github.com/SimHacker/UnityJS/blob/master/notes/Surfa...

Why are you responding with this to me, rather than my parent poster.

Because when attacking your parent poster, you neglected to explain your argument, and the reasons why you believe most people dislike Electron, and why X11 doesn't get the same scorn, which caused you to be downvoted.

Care to elaborate, please?

Do you know if X11, like Electron, supports shared memory textures in the GPU like IOSurface and GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES are for?

> Because when attacking your parent poster, you neglected to explain your argument

I can't force someone to understand something that they do not want to. More than enough people have written, much more eloquently than I, about why electron is bad. None of the critiques I've seen are 'because it relies on an expensive network system'.

EDIT: Hell, even if we assume that the critiques are about "expensive networked system"s, Electron is still incomparable to Xorg so the root-parent's post is making a false comparison.

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