Computers are becoming faster and faster, we should create simpler programming languages that use more resources.
Devs thinking like this are the reason our chat apps and some text editors are in electron, wasting tons of system resources, by running what is essentially its own operating system, chromium.
Just to give an idea, here’s some things I have running on my laptop right now:
App | Ram
| -
Signal Desktop (Electron) | 368 Mb
Lightcord (Discord, Electron) | 367 Mb
Element (Electron) | 212 Mb
Before electron, back in the AIM / IRC / MSN messenger days, these were tiny programs easily runnable on a 256 MB ram machine.
This article is about website bloat, but it equally applies to so many of our chat apps that went from using system libraries and GUI frameworks, to the browser.
When an app is installed on millions of devices, making it more efficient can actually make a not insignificant difference in overall power consumption, and therefore environmental impact.
Amen! Electron is a scourge. Look at MicroSIP, a full SIP chat and call client done in MFC. Exe is 3 MB, uses less that 10 MB RAM. Runs super stable, super quick (native GUI) and light enough to always be on.
It seems like you misunderstood my point. By saying that we should use more resources to make computing simpler I meant something like using a garbage collector, which trades some computing cycles and memory for better productivity and not something like bloating stuff up by using Electron. A lot of programming languages where designed when computers where slower and had not much memory. I would happily give 5% of performance and memory to have another improvement in productivity like the invention of the garbage collector gave us.
… and now it actually feels more productive than Java.
Java has always been full of boilerplate code, therefor it never really was very productive (maybe when compared to C++). I don’t get why anyone still writes Java, when there is Kotlin.
Java code is approximately 50% shorter than C++ code
Kotlin code is approximately 50% shorter than Java code
Haskell code is approximately 80% shorter than Kotlin code
→ what takes one pages in C++, takes 2-4 lines in Haskell.
To the Nushell discussion: Nu is my main shell and I have contributed a bit of code to it in the past.
Devs thinking like this are the reason our chat apps and some text editors are in electron, wasting tons of system resources, by running what is essentially its own operating system, chromium.
Just to give an idea, here’s some things I have running on my laptop right now:
App | Ram
Before electron, back in the AIM / IRC / MSN messenger days, these were tiny programs easily runnable on a 256 MB ram machine.
This article is about website bloat, but it equally applies to so many of our chat apps that went from using system libraries and GUI frameworks, to the browser.
When an app is installed on millions of devices, making it more efficient can actually make a not insignificant difference in overall power consumption, and therefore environmental impact.
I’d love if someone did that calculation too. Could be a LOT of watt-hours per day just wasted by things like discord.
The KDE project has been focusing on sustainability, as a system efficiency metric, for some time now.
If you’d like to read more.
Amen! Electron is a scourge. Look at MicroSIP, a full SIP chat and call client done in MFC. Exe is 3 MB, uses less that 10 MB RAM. Runs super stable, super quick (native GUI) and light enough to always be on.
It seems like you misunderstood my point. By saying that we should use more resources to make computing simpler I meant something like using a garbage collector, which trades some computing cycles and memory for better productivity and not something like bloating stuff up by using Electron. A lot of programming languages where designed when computers where slower and had not much memory. I would happily give 5% of performance and memory to have another improvement in productivity like the invention of the garbage collector gave us.
Java has always been full of boilerplate code, therefor it never really was very productive (maybe when compared to C++). I don’t get why anyone still writes Java, when there is Kotlin.
→ what takes one pages in C++, takes 2-4 lines in Haskell.
To the Nushell discussion: Nu is my main shell and I have contributed a bit of code to it in the past.