Comment by FridgeSeal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FridgeSeal | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> countless of robust desktop apps being made with HTML: VSC, Whatsapp, Skype, Spotify, Notion, Hyper, Discord, Slack

VSC: chokes on files larger than several mb Slack: eats all of your memory, often hangs and just whites-out while I figure out what to do. Skype: has this app ever actually been good? Spotify: not sure I'd call it robust, but it's functional...enough.

> In theory it could outperform native apps....thought most of them will still feel sluggish compared to a native counterpart. React will change that.

My understanding is that native apps hook into far lower-level functionality and run with _signficantly_ less overhead. They simply execute faster, and far more directly. I don't see how React and needing to go through react-framework -> JS -> V8 -> etc would possibly compete with that, let alone outstrip them.

These apps all fall flat, which is the point i'm trying to make. They're robust from a design perspective, the tools we have to build UI are good enough, but they can't compete against native. Do you think that using Svelte in any those would make a difference? This is why React is attempting to find a solution.

The problem is essentially the same. Native apps are also conflicted with load, they have better means than we have on the web to deal with it, but it's still low-level and complex to orchestrate, threading for instance. Any one of those means pushes your app into async issuee, race conditions that you need to reconcile. With concurrent mode scheduling is a first class concept, your components won't be subject to race conditions. React maintains 60fps, high-priority content (user input, animations, transitions) can be ran fluidly while lesser priority content gets deferred. It has a good chance of outperforming multithreaded native apps with that model.

This demo illustrates the issue: https://youtu.be/nLF0n9SACd4?t=172 which is universal. You run into this on native platforms as well as on the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com