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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it's not hard to outperform something written in Electron with native code with a factor of ten :) Anyway, this is really impressive, so good job!

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Opening a 1GB JSON file and scrolling, editing, and keeping syntax highlighting correct is something that even native text editors struggle with.

Sublime have opened way larger files with no issues for me

I’ll second this. And to emphasize, so it’s not just a useless “+1 comment”: I never cared for Sublime as an editor, despite some effort to appreciate it when it was at its popularity peak. But it instantly became, and remained, my go to editor for working with huge files.

Native code does not replace efficient algorithms.

V8 can also JIT JS to something that runs fast, although the extra layers of abstraction between web code and platform interfaces do not help, and V8 can only do so much.

Notepad++ is a champ at doing that, as long as it has line breaks. (It chokes with massive single-line files like any other editor)

Love Notepad++ to bits, but it chokes on just 20MB of nicely-formatted XML if you have syntax highlighting on. Disable that (if you can figure out how), and you're golden.

I had to buy UltraEdit which is capable of handling 10GB files (the size in my case). Nothing else that I tried would work. Of course, this was ten years ago. I havent had to work with very large text files since then.

It was able to perform search and replace at an acceptable and responsive pace, nearly instant.

With a native editor, like Sublime, it may take a while to become functional, but it will eventually do what I want.

With VS Code, loading in a big file usually crashes it.

Thankfully I don’t have to deal with this as much as I used to.

One of the benefits of Electron is being able to build the same app for multiple operating systems. When writing GUI app using native OS calls, how does one make sure the code is compatible with all three major operating systems?

Typically by reading docs and writing compliant code.

Were it only that easy

Tell me how its fundamentally not this easy? Its just not really "easy" to write correct compliant code.

Folks did this plenty prior to Electron, either by using cross-platform GUI toolkits (GTK and Qt both run on Windows, Java's been doing this forever with Swing and JavaFX, etc), or by writing GUIs for multiple toolkits/OSes that work with the same/similar core application logic.

Electron makes it easier to build cross-platform apps, and certainly cheaper, but it's not like it's the only way to do it.

I'm the author. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to confirm it still performs well (I never tried it on linux). It did, SDL has been ported to just about every OS. I have some OS specific code for windows but not much. The only OS specific things were executing a binary + stdio + closing it and slight differences in socket code (mostly used for DAP). C++ now has filesystem support so I didn't need any OS specific code for that

This is an important consideration for the developer/publisher, but less so for the user.

I use all three major operating systems on a daily basis, and typically preferentially prefer single-OS apps, as I can typically expect them to be more performant and to better follow a platform's UI conventions.

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