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Comment by JakaJancar | Hacker News Reader

So Figma is written in JS and C++, compiled to WebAssembly so it runs in a browser, which runs in a datacenter, with video streamed to Mighty, an Electron app where the front-end is written in JS and some C++, running inside Chromium.

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If only we could render web pages server-side and send some kind of highly-compressible lightweight drawing instructions to the client.

I feel like we engineers are putting too many abstractions on things. It's like we are all peddling "get rich quick" schemes to people trying to weasel our way into some super popular process. This screams like an anti-direct-to-consumer model.

STOP CREATING MIDDLEMEN! It's going to cost me 30 bucks to just browse the web where I spend another dollar amount to where someone collects a "handling fee". Jesus I feel like the world is going nuts.

Most remote X server setups have high latency.

I was making an observation about HTML, perhaps too cutely.

Apparently Google’s Blimp[0] project was exactly that before being abandoned.

[0]: https://github.com/crosswalk-project/chromium-crosswalk/tree...

For those that missed the joke, they are referring to server-side rendering and sending only HTML to the client.

This doesn’t solve the Figma case tho.

I feel like most of the people responding to your comment have missed the joke...

it would have to be PDFs . 60 PDFs / second

Aside from your HTML interpretation there's another interesting thing that's been tried by a remote browser start up bought by cloudflare, called, I think it was, s2. They hooked into the chromium rendering engine skia drawing instructions and instead of sending screenshots or video from the remote browser to the client they sent the skia drawing instructions and then rebuilt the entire rendering of the HTML client side.

Point taken. But there's a time and a place for everything - nowadays we have the tech to stream the contents of the desktop, and quite probably to it real time. So you could say the problem HTML was solving is gone.

Browsh (https://brow.sh) is doing this. RDP too.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

It's this, but as a business model

... on a vm that runs on a browser that runs in an OS that runs in a VM that runs on another OS

utility companies and chip-makers really don't have to worry about going out of business any time soon

.. and then people complain about Bitcoin

Bitcoin trumps the absurdity of the waste outlined above and gets worse over time

If Mighty is feeling cavalier they can cut some of the JS sandboxing and go straight to hypervisor level sandboxing.

this is nightmare inducing

Chill, just add an even more powerful super computer to run your Mighty cluster

Mighty is probably not an Electron app? How did you get that

>probably

It is an electron app, as unlikely as it sounds.

Again source for that?

That sounds... just ridiculous.

edit: omg really

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/mighty

As I understand it, they are just using electron for some GUI elements like the toolbar, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

So this has what it's come to huh...

i hate this planet

Then good news, between modern software development practices, NFTs, and just plain fucking laziness and incompetence, there won't anything left of it soon!

honestly, probably for the best anyway

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