Damn electron and the likes - eviltoast
  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The fact that electron both exists and is one of the most popular cross-platform development frameworks tells you everything you need to know about the current potato’d state of software development.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      The underlying issue is that nobody wants to develop using any of the available cross-platform toolkits that you can compile into native binaries without an entire browser attached. You could use Qt or GTK to build a cross-platform application. But if you use Electron, you can just run the same application on the browser AND as a standalone application.

      Me? I’m considering developing my next application in Qt out of all things because it does actually have web support via WASM and I want to learn C++ and gain some Qt experience. Good idea? Probably not.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I have developed personalized tools as part of my job and I chose qt to write them in partially because if a company I work for would ever try to commercialize them, they’d have to either buy qt licenses or open source them.

        I cheat a bit though because I use qt through python.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s like so many programmers never evolve past the “playing around with web dev stuff” days. The fact that JavaScript is one of the most used languages is appalling.

      The whole 1+1 = 11 meme made me laugh and then avoid JavaScript whenever possible, but I wonder if many others saw it and thought, “now I’ve gained more experience in JavaScript!”

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I will also never understand how JavaScript development has gotten so complicated with seemingly zero benefits. It takes minutes to do a “frontend build” and the output grows larger all of the time. I bumped into some Angular crap that was hundreds of megabytes somehow, and still AJAX fetched the same info 4x on page load because the “MVCC” or whatever it’s called didn’t even buy them the abstraction of using the same values multiple times on one page…

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Yeah it’s ridiculous with every small app needing to be packaged with a full DOM and maybe even an http server for all I know and what should have been a few kb ends up being 1000x that or more.

    • HStone32@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      You know, I’ve always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.

      But you know what? Everybody around me keeps saying I’m being silly. They keep telling me I won’t find any jobs like that. They say I should just swallow my juvenile preferences and go with what’s popular, chasing trends for the entire rest of my career.

      I don’t think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You know, I’ve always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.

        That’s awesome, and honestly who knows what you’ll come up with if you’re given time to follow your passion there. Decades ago SCM was done through CVS and SVN and other pieces of garbage until Linus came out with Git which a main reason that it is so good IMO is its speed. Google Chrome arrived on the scene in a lot of the same way (of course now it’s as bloated a cow as any other browser, but at the time it was faster than anything available).

        I don’t think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.

        No definitely not. Electron is basically a creation of idiot middle management who insist that the web app and the app app be the same exact thing and be developed by the same group of understaffed, underpaid, underappreciated developers. So they worked out a framework to make it so they could change something in one place and have it reflected everywhere.

        But it’s still as potato as it gets.

    • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Back in the very early 2000s my dad went back to college. There he learne c++ but he also leatned that a great programer makes the program work ans keeps it small. Even bavk his teacher was complianing about newer programs taking up more and more ram.