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Comment by SoothingSorbet | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, is there a good reason to use Dillo over something like Netsurf or Ladybird nowadays? They support far more of the Web (i.e. more likely to be useful) while still being lightweight.

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Ladybird is pretty far from approachable for most folks at this point but one day will hopefully be a great option in that space

Unfortunately, with it's use of Swift code, QT (which is now a bloated piece of trash since version 5) etc. It's just not tenable unless they give us a pure version without that shit

Why/how does the presence of Swift make QT a bloated piece of trash?

Genuine question. I know little of QT and nothing of its history re: Swift or version 5.

Swift means it'll require LLVM.

QT is bloated and resource intensive. Most of us don't want gigabytes of data being spent on special effects.

What is your definition of bloated? My note-taking app (with animations) binary is around 89MB[1][2]. And this is without statically linking it, using `-optimize-size` and `-ltcg` flags and running `strip` and `UXP` on it which should make it even smaller.

[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor#8-performance

[2] https://get-notes.com/

I'm not OP, but 90Mb for a note taking app is incredibly bloated.

Exactly. People think it's okay to waste memory just because.

Well, it's not a simple note-taking app, it has a Block Editor like Notion, tho it's written in QML and C++ so it's very performant. Compare that to most Electron apps these days, and it has a way smaller binary size, way more performant, and uses much less RAM. I do aspire to trim its binary size down further, I just didn't put my attention on it yet.

It's always about choosing the best compromise, I just think Qt is a very good one . It allows you to target many platforms with a declarative UI (QML) and a compiled language (C++ or other bindings). It's a superb form of abstraction layer compared to web apps.

I'll grant you that in a world where a chat app like Discord is >400 Mb, this is on the smaller side, but that just goes to show how low our standards have become.

But then consider for a moment that the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb installed.

> but that just goes to show how low our standards have become

I totally agree. We need to do better. But I still stand with Qt being a good option. There are ways to lower Qt apps binary sizes down to 11MB[1] or 8.3MB[2].

[1] https://www.qt.io/blog/reducing-binary-size-of-qt-applicatio...

[2] https://www.kdab.com/qt-quick-without-a-gpu-i-mx6-ull/

Qt hails from the era when software was routinely measured in megabytes, so it's designed with that in mind. I suspect that it's QML specifically that contributes the most bloat in this case.

Nedit takes like 6M on a Linux machine.

Older and lighter toolkits like fltk are better.

QT I can see how it is disturbing.

Swift I can not see how it would bloat anything for end users. It’s just another compiled language.

It’s a compiled language, but in terms of runtime performance, memory usage, and binary size, it’s closer to C#/Java/Go than C/C++/Rust. Yet its compile times are among the worst of any of those.

> QT I can see how it is disturbing.

Compared to WinUI, Android, iOS, GTk3+, let alone Electron, is there even a reason to hate/fear Qt past-2010 or so?

Motif is still a thing!!!

We're proud of you! xoxoxo

:-p

Swift requires LLVM and has shit performance. I'm generally a fan of only C/C++ and Pascal/Modula stuff. All these new found languages like Rust and swift are pure trash.

NetSurf’s UX, at least on Linux, is worse. The engine renders more but the actual browser around it feels half baked which is not the case with Dillo. Perhaps the main RISC OS version isn’t like this. The Windows version was barely functional last I tried it, it was not even what I would call pre-alpha, it was basically just a tech demo.

Have you tried using Ladybird? The performance is unfortunately not very good. On the other hand Dillo loads pages instantly, even if most pages don't look right.

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