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Comment by 2ion | Hacker News Reader

Even a very large amount of data pasted should not blow up a text box in 2021. I mean, on Windows you can paste an object referring to a data blob pretty sure, macOS surely has something similar and on X/Wayland you could sniff and size of data pasted in advance and do something useful. If it's plain text like JSON even 5G of plain text should not bring a text box to its knees when the memory is available, it's not being rendered at the same time ... still getting irritated by Firefox taking forever to render a 10M email source code in plain text when it could do something smart and render/view only the viewport that's showing. Somewhere GUI engineers stopped being smart.

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> Even a very large amount of data pasted should not blow up a text box in 2021. I mean, on Windows you can paste an object referring to a data blob pretty sure, macOS surely has something similar and on X/Wayland you could sniff and size of data pasted in advance and do something useful.

You can do so for sure. But can you do all these platform specific optimisations in Electron?

And even if you could, the reason companies go for electron is that they don't want to bother with platform specific stuff so they're really likely not to bother.

A agree a mere few megabytes of text should not bother any computer made this decade by the way and that teams is a pig of an app.

But the problem is not what's possible, it's them prioritising new features over performance and with that all the technology decisions they made.

> still getting irritated by Firefox taking forever to render a 10M email source code in plain text when it could do something smart and render/view only the viewport that's showing.

How do you know what's supposed to be in the viewport, especially if the font isn't monospaced? You have to 'render' the entire thing at least once - at least to the point of measuring the dimensions of text (not a cheap thing) and figuring out where you have to force linebreaks. And whenever the user resizes their window horizontally or does various other things, you have to do it again.

Your typical browser is already pretty good at this - not to the point some dedicated text viewers/editors are, but pretty good.

It's a monospaced font. Though even if it should have to render everything at least once, it should be in the blink of an eye --- at this point I'm almost convinced that getting a laptop with 10th gen i7 class CPU, 32G RAM and a RTX2060 graphics card to absolve myself of desktop performance issues was a mistake as it forces my to run Windows for flawless Optimus interop and does not get rid of desktop performance issues either. Maybe font rendering is not optimized enough or not accelerated at all, but a few million letters the most of them not even visible should be nothing on this machine drawing 100W and more but not performing much better at this specific task than my Haswell laptop from 2014.

Slack handles it cleanly. It tells you the paste is too large and tells you how to add an attachment instead.

That is the difference of specialised software in comparison to duct-taped solution like Teams. The first one has code to decide what is meaningful for the user in a given context, the second "just renders" the whole thing and show the user a thumbnail, probably without even knowing what kind of content it is dealing with.

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