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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

OK I’ll take the bait.

Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?

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What’s implied here is that devs were supposed to optimize for user resources, not for developer convenience.

Maybe we can have AI rewrite those programs and optimize for low ram usage

Maybe; if it's a Js / electron app there's a lower boundary though. The main issue is that the web (html/css) is the most versatile UX platform out there, nothing even comes close. You can't build most web apps' unique visual style in any other platform. Yet. Let alone have it crossplatform.

> You can't build most web apps' unique visual style in any other platform.

Every native UI framework I've ever used allows drawing directly to a canvas, and can have literally any visual style that can be created with pixels.

They were supposed to optimize for the situation in which they weren't the only program running on a computer, and they failed to do it.

Can you blame them? Users didn't care. Heck, developers didn't care - look at how popular vscode is.

Revealed preferences aside, every dev comment section for 10 years HAS been full of people loudly insulting Electron.

Honestly, despite being Electron VSCode manages to outspeed every other editor on my machine (by qualitative metrics), even stuff like Zed (which manages to lag on stuff VSCode doesn’t despite performance being its main selling point)

Time to bring back 32 bit OS, that way you only need 4GB RAM per computer!

640k ought to be enough for anybody. Sorry had to be said.

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