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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> Linux is probably the system that suffers the least from these issues as it still feels pretty snappy on modest hardware. […]. That said, this is only an illusion. As soon as you start installing any modern app that wasn’t developed exclusively for Linux… the slow app start times and generally poor performance show up.

This is not an illusion. Cross-platform programs suck, so everyone avoids them, right? Electron apps and whatnot are universally mocked. You would only use one for an online services like Spotify or something. The normal use case is downloading some nice native code from your repo.

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> Cross-platform programs suck, so everyone avoids them, right?

The thing is, cross-platform tooling sucks. A plain CLI program is already bad enough to get running across platforms - even among Unix/POSIX compliant-ish platforms, which is why autoconf, cmake and a host of other tools exist... but GUI programs? That's orders of magnitude worse to get right. And games manage to blow past that as every platform has their completely own graphics stack.

Electron and friends abstract all that suckiness away from developers and allow management to hire cheap fresh JS coding bootcamp graduates instead of highly capable and paid Qt/Gtk/SDL/whatever consultants.

>consultants

Who?

I see people constantly talking about those "consultants", yet what they are?

Just dev that has single-person company?

there's a ton of consulting companies which are humonguous. Companies like Accenture with 780000 employees, Tata Consultancy with 488000 consultants, CapGemini with 300k-ish... it's one of the largest businesses in the world

These write big turds.

If they can't afford to write a simple cross-platform QT5 based software for actual computing (AKA desktops except for niche usage on art with iPad for drawings and some audio production), they are doomed. Period.

Just to reword the sibling; none of those consultants ever created a best-selling piece of software.

They are not the people that create the software you install on your machine. That task is usually done by a lone developer at some random place.

I mean, I don't think that's exactly a fair comparison. These companies are focused a lot (and I mean a lot) more on enterprise software than your regular desktop software. I'm talking about Banking Systems, Automation Platforms, Government Software, stuff that has no use outside the corporate world. And they do genuinely do good work in these areas. Sure, they're not pioneers or doing some groundbreaking research, but they do their job and they do their job well (of course there are exceptions - but these aren't 100 billion dollar companies for nothing).

> but these aren't 100 billion dollar companies for nothing

Producing the best possible software doesn't produce the highest possible revenue. You'd want to produce something that works well enough that it's viable for the customer to keep hiring your consultants, but also makes it necessary to continuously keep hiring them.

So that translates to producing the worst possible software that barely works. So no, they're not $100B companies for nothing. They know exactly how to walk that line.

> And they do genuinely do good work in these areas.

I have seen genuinely passable. And lots of "good enough until we fix the underlining issue".

What I have never seen is offshored developers doing really good work. And I'm convinced their incentive structure will always punish anybody that tries.

I've seen turds as web pages at the Spanish Goverment or even the Healthcare systems. Those are designed to deliberaterly harm the user experience full of judicial jargon so companies in the middle can get lots of profit handling the "legalese" such as filling the taxes.

Hello, I'm a consultant. In practice it's just a fancy word for temps. Company hsa money and needs some engineers but don't want to hire or take up the burden of employment, and / or needs some fresh bodies to wake up their in-house developers / make them fear for their own jobs because they've stagnated, they call us.

But we're a relatively small consultancy (think hundreds instead of tens of thousands like the bigger players), so it's a bit more refined. We do have decent developers, but the issue with consultancy on that level is they're too smart for their own good, they will suggest an over-engineered solution that can't be maintained by anyone BUT these consultants and / or hired self-employed people. It's a weird fallacy, a weird rotating door of consultants and cycles of development where every 10 or so years they do a full rearchitecture / rebuild of their back-ends, while meanwhile some people just sit and maintain the existing - and working - core systems.

It's massively wasteful. But it usually pays better than a regular in-house developer, and it's lower risk than going self-employed because you still work for an employer who pays you per month. I'm just salty that said employer creams off 2/3rds of my hourly rate.

> The thing is, cross-platform tooling sucks.

No, they don't always suck. As an example, QT is cross platform, fast and complete.

But Electron is god awfully slow, and Eclipse can be too. The difference is QT apps are compiled and are generally written in C/C++, where are Electron and Eclipse are interpreted / JIT'ed, and use GC under the hood. As a consequence, they run at 1/2 the speed, use many times more RAM and to make matters worse Electron is single threaded.

The problem isn't cross platform. It's the conveniences most programmers lean on to make themselves productive - like GC, or async so they can avoid the dangers of true concurrency, or an interpreter to so they don't have to recompile for every platform out there. They do work - we are more productive in turning out code, but the come at a cost.

Electron apps may be mocked, but they're not avoided by most. VS Code is probably the #1 programmer's editor these days.

Somehow VS Code manages to run Electron and loads in roughly the same amount of time as Sublime Text needs that's compiled into a native binary.

Maybe Tauri will make things better in the long run, but so far I haven't heard of any adoption at all.

I think you’re saying that decades of r&d by the largest tech companies in the world can eventually produce a browser runtime that renders text about as fast as a couple people working in python and C.

Imagine what could have been achieved had the same amount of R&D been poured into a native framework.

"But that's haaaarddddddd for me as a lazy software developer who went to college and learned complex algorithms and calculus and physics and chemistry just because but can't seem to handle a few #ifdefs because they aren't in vogue anymore"

Except our organization builds python and java apps so all our shit is multiplatform by default or even by accident. Hell, I put together consistent, cross platform Swing UIs before I even understood what maven was.

But it’s not a native framework it’s 5 or 6 native frameworks splitting the energy between them.

VS Code does not feel slow to me , how are they getting such good performance ?

I kinda disagree with this. I have definitely noticed that my cursor can be slow to respond when some linting/formatting (I can't quite tell what is causing it, I just notice it) is going on. Totally usable, but I'm also coming from emacs and it's not like emacs is known to be blazing fast so I actually think my experience is sort of inline with the article's point.

Despite or because of emacs being older, it's more responsive than vscode in my usage.

They care about and test for performance issues/regressions.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue+labe...

Have you ever used Sublime or Vim?

Vscode is fast compared to most modern editors, but it's still twice as slow as Sublime in terms of input latency, UI responsiveness, text coloring etc.

An hour with Sublime/Vim followed by going back to Vscode is a painful experience...

On Windows, what other options do you really have?

Webstorm

It's not really a 100% replacement for all of VS Code's features, but there is a pretty big overlap in functionality that may meet most people's requirements: Notepad++

Notepad++ ?

Various language-specific IDEs like Spyder ?

eMacs

vim run inside of WSL. i'm serious.

There are a host of alternatives on Windows. Or buy a real IDE, like the JetBrains products.

IntelliJ, Android-Studio, CLion, PyCharm...

Jetbrains' products.

Sublime Text

Emacs. Either native or WSL, both are fine.

Besides all the other alternatives offered by siblings, Kate also works on Windows:

https://kate-editor.org/get-it/

I remember back when Java programs were painfully slow, these days I've fled vscode for clion.

Browsers are ridiculously fast. People just add more and more until they hit the wall where they need to start optimizing. For someone trying to get things done, that’s probably the right method. But it means that ultimately what determines how fast your program runs is not how fast your computer runs, but how much delay you’re okay with.

It's not just cross-platform programs that suck. Applications moving to gtk4 from gtk3 add an extra 100-200ms of startup latency every time because of OpenGL initialization and shader compilation (there is currently no cache), varying a lot depending on your CPU. Applications that used to open instantly now have have a noticeable pause, even if it's still short compared to the worst Windows applications. It's been reported multiple times for well over a year now and no improvements have been made.

Not really sure about the cross-platform caveat... `dropbox-lnx` eats away 265MB of RES for it's file syncing job, I'm pretty sure what Dropbox was doing on my old laptop was very heavily 265MBly important. Also, `keepassxc` takes away 180MB of RES when you opened it.

The first Linux that I've used, Mandriva (KDE), runs smoothly on my Intel Pentium 4 PC with 256MB of RAM. I can even do some web browsing (Flash gaming) and music playing without feeling slow. That's an entire OS, running on 256MB of RAM.

Use rclone instead of dropbox.

On MDV, KDE and PIV, same here with an Athlon 2000 and 256 MB of RAM with Knoppix and later FreesBIE with XFCE, which ran much faster and snappier than even today's i7's with Plasma 5.

And if it's for an online service, why even have it as a separate app? Just run it in your browser. You'll get the exact same thing but in the one instance of Chromium that you already run anyway. You also get the added benefit that your extensions work with it.

I can run Slack, VSCode, and Spotify in browser tabs but it's more convenient to switch between them using the Dock and Cmd-Tab.

Have you tried to use them as PWAs?

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