Comment by fouric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fouric | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's not just memory efficiency - webtech applications are significantly more CPU-hungry than desktop applications.

> It makes it much easier to develop software

I've never seen compelling evidence that this is the case. Every time this argument is made, it seems to be by a webdev who has no significant experience with building desktop applications. Sure, if you already know webdev, it's easy to build things with webtech. This isn't particularly interesting. I'm much more productive building desktop applications than webapps, but that's because I've spent almost all of my time building desktop applications.

The real question is, given an average developer who has spent around the same amount of time on learning web development and desktop development, and both at a minimum amount of time (say, 100 hours) - which is more productive, and by how much?

I think that is the wrong question to ask. Web apps are more productive, almost by default, because you don’t need to rewrite the application for each distribution target.

I can build a web application and deploy it on the web, on Windows, on Mac OSX, on iOS, on Android, on Linux, immediately. With minimal extra effort, assuming I know what I’m doing.

Correct me if I’m wrong (it’s possible), but I don’t think that’s at all possible with native libraries, or even cross-platform frameworks like Qt.

It also means companies don’t have to hire multiple product teams. They can hire one team.

So even if native development is 10-20% more productive (I’d disagree, but for arguments sake), it’d still fall short.

Webtech might score low on the CPU efficiency scale, but it scores very high when it comes product timelines, headcount, payroll and (arguably) ease-of-hiring.

This is why I think webtech almost always makes more business sense. At least for your typical SaaS product.

This is why I’m excited for WASM. We might finally have the tooling for truly cross-platform development without sacrificing efficiency/low level control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com