Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

You know the thing I worry about next: how are apps going to inevitably bloat in inefficiency and claw back the improvements in CPU?

View on HN

In Electron 14, we have found an astounding new paradigm for writing apps that results in astounding developer time savings! Now instead of running your Javascript app inside a copy of Chrome, we have a custom hybrid of Javascript and Lisp, which is internally transpiled onto a Brainfuck interpreter running in Conway's Life!

Electron 15: The Life machine has been re-implemented as a series of GPU instructions, which will use up approximately 93% of most users' graphics performance in return for a 20% speedup!

Electron 16: completely rewritten in Minecraft Redstone.

Of course, since Minecraft runs on all platforms, this makes Electron even more platform independent.

Sooner or later this is going to turn into that movie Inception.

Seriously why can't we just fix the bottom layers!!! Why does every problem have to be solved by adding ever more layers!

Well, the great thing is that as long as computers are bifurcated between a majority of slow Intel PC's and a minority of fast Apple Macs... apps will need to remain usable on Intels, so they'll hopefully stay super-fast on Macs! ;)

Was thinking the same exact thing while reading this. We’ll have a good chunk of lead time on that.

I don't understand. Don't those two things seem antithetical? Like why would you make your app inefficient at the same time you optimize it for the CPU?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Applied to computers, if you double the CPU speed, the program can be half as efficient with no apparent loss to the user. Similar with memory. If you can assume your typical gamer has a 2TB (or now much larger) storage capacity, you can ship a 250GB game. But then it gets complicated when everyone does the same thing. If every program is half as efficient as it could be (in CPU usage or memory), then there has been no gain with the new system.

I think they're saying that devs won't spend as much time optimizing, since they know that the CPU is faster.

That makes sense and is to be expected. A faster hardware does take away some of the incentive. As the old adage goes - "Necessity is the mother of invention"

A lot of people think that less than maximal performance is sacrilege though, which is why people are already complaining.

Yes. Exactly this

Whenever a new, faster CPU comes out, developers act quick to compensate for that with bloated frameworks to make sure you consistently get the same laggy experience.

Simple historical observation -- any time a performance jump happens, the underlying uses of it expand to fill up the improvement in processing.

Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't make, and consumers buy, faster hardware?

I'd suggest that someone who breaks into Slack HQ and secretly installs a underclocking kernel extension on all their developers' Macs wouldn't be a bad person.

I wonder if "Electron runs fine on my machine" can be banned under hate speech rules instead of being allowed under free speech.

Yeah this is my #1 concern with all of this. It's bad enough in software to need a new leap in hardware to completely bury all the issues.

The consumers buy part, yes, if the only reason they need it is because software has become stupidly inefficient. All of this e-waste is not good for the planet, and manufacturing is a significant contributor to global warming.

If consumers are replacing their computers to do things they couldn't do ten years ago, then great, that's a good use of resources!

If consumers are replacing their computers because today's IM clients are 10x slower than the perfectly good clients we had ten years ago, that's a problem!

Thinking of speed in terms of processing capacity consumption, 10x would be unbelievably generous. It's realistically a LOT closer to 1000x

Nothing they said indicated that in any way.

And then Apple will make us buy newer and better and faster models. Now, we can't even upgrade RAM

I bought a lot of Apple stuff but I don't remember Apple ever making me to do that.

s/inefficient/doing more/g

Doing more of what? As a user, I'd rather wait a month for a proper native app than get an electron pile of crap in a week.

While theres no way for me to have a source for this but I would hazard a guess and say most apps that use Electron simply would not exist without it. Maybe someone would fill the void if they had the idea, money and knowhow to build a native app on whatever platform you use but probably unlikely.

Basically, no way you'd just be waiting an extra month for your native version.

So let it be. If there's a niche waiting to be filled, there are bound to be multiple attempts at that. The world would've been a better place without electron.

The key issue is that you, if you are a typical customer, wouldn't pay for your share of that extra development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com