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Comment by sitzkrieg | Hacker News Reader

yea, we certainly wouldn’t want regular user applications to run fast or respect user resources. can’t have that

I, for one, can't see any speed difference between a program written in Pascal (Total Commander, which I use every day) and one written in C++ (Windows Explorer).

File browsers are probably the worst example you could use here. The actual file manipulations are handled by the OS. The rest of it is just displaying lists of files, so no real speed difference would be noticed in different languages/programs. Most of the time the file browser is just sitting there waiting for user interaction.

The programs that do benefit from speed aren't file browsers.

There are a lot of applications like that though, only they're all being rewritten for electron.

It's the only example I could come up with. There aren't that many programs written in Pascal.

You can’t compare apples to elephants here.

You can have that without writing them in C or C++.

you sure can. i recommend forth

Even if that was the tradeoff, your average C/C++ program isn't notably fast or lean.

The C programs I use daily are generally very fast, very lean and very stable: Programs such as linux, terminals, shells, vim, etc.

Most programmers don’t have 30 years to perfect their code

It had no crash during 30 years, not after 30 years.

I did, in Linux. It was pretty common too. It got fix. But, every now and then, I still get an occasional panic.

I also recall having my shell crashing (zsh or bash, I don't remember).

I certainly also remember the kernel crashing, but this was in the 90s. Later perhaps once or twice on faulty hardware. Shell, I don't think I have seen this ever.

In my case, the crashes were from last year to the start of this one. Some were related to AMDGPU, others to my WiFi card driver, so they're pretty recent.

I don't quite remember the details of the shell crash, I only remember it being on a tool that've never seem crash due to a fault signal. It was somewhat amusing.

I’ll take a Qt application over the Electron garbage that we see all the time nowadays.

It could be worse but that's not much of an argument for C in particular. There's a lot of ways to do UI that don't involve web engines.

10-100x develop & maintain cost.

good. browser uis always end up sucking more

false dichtonomy

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