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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks.

And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

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How slim can you really be when your stack bundles an entire web browser so you can push pixels on the screen? Focusing on performance probably requires running away from such bloat.

Remember: 25 years ago we were able to write relatively fast GUI applications. They may have gotten prettier, fancier, and screens have definitely grown larger. Still, computers are now much faster. And with M2 drives, starting a word processor or a drawing application should be instantaneous. Yet somehow it isn't.

You're right, the main problem is the lack of focus on performance. Here's the thing though: if we did focus on performance, we wouldn't have tolerated such bloated stacks in the first place.

IMO it’s the increase in platforms that have pushed people towards a cross-platform solution even though it’s pretty wasteful. In the 90s if I wanted to write an application to target most computer users I would have written a Windows application. Now, depending on the app you need to target MacOS, Linux, web, iOS, Android.

I think people underestimate how much stuff you have to learn to be an effective UI developer on a new stack. There’s layout rules, visual customization, state management, how to organize your effectively for large code based, debugging, accessibility, localization, visual effects. Not to mention how fleshed out the tooling and documentation is for the web stack. Browser dev tools are really good. It’s no wonder people want to reuse all those skills to build UIs.

If even companies like Spotify or Slack think they don’t have the resources to build custom applications per platform, smaller companies or teams won’t either. (I say think because I disagree with their strategy but that’s beside the point). We need a way for people to use their web stack knowledge without requiring a full browser.

Very much agree.

I think web-dev, for better or worse, has pioneered a lot of UI concepts and design strategies purely by being more accessible.

Getting those lessons into a more efficient compiled form would be a great step, and I do think TypeScript is slowly approaching a place where it might be able to bridge that gap.

> And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

No. Literall every Electron chat app (Signal, Discord, Element, Slack, etc) is slow, laggy and unresponsive, while every Qt chat app (Telegram, Ripcord, Nheko) is blazing fast.

Pardon me, but slim and fast? Xclock from the 1980s (long, long before Qt) was tens of kilobytes. "XClock" on Android is 2.6MB. "XClock" as an Electron app would weigh tens of megabytes.

This isn't progress, no matter how pretty those clock hands are.

I'll admit, this was my first chuckle out loud of the day. No stack would intentionally label itself as such, while basically all of them eventually become that. If you bundle the world in your package, expect bloated outcomes, in all of its cyclically-dependent glory.

How can you build something slim and fast on Electron? It's essentially Chrome running Javascript, isn't it?

For an example of what I think is slim and fast, consider Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool[1]. I downloaded it a week ago and used it. It's 150 kB.

[1]: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

None of those frameworks are slim and fast. No framework is going to admit that they are bloated, and many will claim to be slim and fast, despite the fact that they are not.

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