On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 at 10:30:21 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 14:38:44 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:
That's definitely what I'm trying to avoid... I feel those
kinds of interfaces are 99% of the time mega bloated for what
they are. Discord is the only one that seemed big enough for
the britches of an entire browser instance. Absolutely not a
fan of Electron and the like.
I have never tried dwt! I should give that a shot. And I was
trying gtkd once, and I should probably try again. Back then,
I had to compile with --build=plain due to some weird linker
issues.
The advantage of using web technologies for UI:
- high re-usability: use the same or similar
layout+functionality for desktop, Android/iPhone apps and web
based UIs.
- freedom as to layout and theming with CSS (highly
customizable for users too)
- cross platform: no need to deploy libs (e.g. Gtk on Mac and
Windows)
- maintenance: older JS code / CSS will still be ok in _most_
cases, whereas Gtk and other frameworks introduce depractaions
and breaking changes so that you have to a) rewrite parts of
your code and b) maintain older (outdated) versions of the
program until you can be sure that the older libs are no longer
used / distributed
- distribution: While users don't care about your maintenance
costs, they do care about having an app available on their
smart phones/desktops/online. So multiply various versions of
say a Gtk app by platform (_at least_ you have to maintain
2Gtk*3Platform = 6 apps). Users hate being told that it only
works on Linux desktop. Thus, web technologies can be a real
gain.
- progress: web technologies have made huge progress JS and CSS
are much better now. Layout and js engines are much smarter as
well. So you benefit from this and get it more or less for free
on every platform.
These are nice points, but the fact remains that running a web
browser torun something as simple as a text editor is extremely
inefficient. I personally don't use atom, VS-code or anything
else, because they are all very slow. I tried VC-code once. It
was nice in terms of UI, but was borderline unusable because it
would take almost half a second to register keys, and the laptop
fans would always spin up.
Using it on a laptop means:
- You will be using far more memory. This means its harder to
open multiple tabs or programs (profiler + editor or docs in
Firefox)
- Mobile device battery life takes a hit. This is non negligible.
Battery life on my old mac using just vim (with a few plugins) is
6 hrs. With vs-code it was 2-3 hrs
- Way more on disk memory. With disk space becoming cheap, this
is less of a concern for most modern devices, but why be
wasteful? Besides, in developing countries, its still pretty hard
to get lots of storage, which means users are forced to decide
which apps are more important.
- If the mobile device's CPU is under less load, in general it
will remain cooler and thus less likely to throttle. Putting
pressure on the thermal cap by running CPU intensive programs
like a browser, when it can be done more efficiently is bad
We should be getting more efficient with time, especially
considering Moore's law is on its last legs, not less efficient
