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The demise of native coded apps
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Posted by Lothar Scholz
Dec 19, 2020 at 04:49 PM
As a developer i can tell you that the reason why lots of things are now done with Electron is that Microsoft is aweful, they totally failed to improve anything for desktop development in the last 15 years (2005 when they wanted everyone move to WPF/C#). There is just no acceptable windows toolkit anymore. I had high hopes that now they learned it after failing so hard with UWP and Windows 8/Windows Phone/Windows RT. Now they announced WinUI3 as the new way to develop native code apps on windows with an expected first release date someday in 2021 at the same time when Linux will finally get Gtk4.
We will see how many use it. The main problem with most other toolkits is that they don’t scale well to multicores. Electron is more or less single threaded and can’t use GPU computational acceleration in any way. This means it uses around 1-5% of the power that is available in your new $2000 computer.
Evernote as mentioned had another problem, they have a pretty simple GUI but they didn’t even abstract the common business logic. If they only had to port the platform GUI part then they might have stayed with native code. They move from one into the total opposite direction, again one more sign that CEOs are awful and not smarter then Joe Average but get millions of salaries.
What is more important that Apple puts interesting stuff from the business layer logic into the operating system with it’s AI and natural language features. Microsoft has nothing, it all runs in Azure and needs web services and enforces subscriptions on the developed applications. Linux has nothing, neither in the OS nor in the Cloud.
And finally a word to Android. Android is not a desktop system, it’s a phone system. It’s not designed to run good apps like we have on iOS. Just simple as that. And the choice of Java as main development language is nowadays terrible and someone should replace it fast. But somehow Google is awful too. Almost every software package they get into their hand starts to stink. Google it and you find the interviews with people who expain why this is, they idea to hire the smartest people makes software unmaintainable. It’s an interesting read.
If we had a good note taking cross platform program i could bomb you with lots links to links to backup my arguments. But i still haved found one
Posted by Andy Brice
Dec 19, 2020 at 05:28 PM
@Lothar Scholz
I agree that Microsoft’s approach (or lack of) to desktop GUI platforms for the last decade (and more) has been totally shambolic. What a mess. I don’t even know what the current recommended GUI platform for Windows is. Even if I did, it will probably be replaced within 2 years. And the underlying Win32 API gives me the dry heaves (this function call has 15 arguments, each of which is a struct, mostly containing NULLs).
I tried Javascript, but was horrified by the messy scoping and type rules. Ugh. But I hear Typescript is much better. Does it still have object-based (rather than class-based) inheritance, like Javascript?
Posted by Christoph
Dec 19, 2020 at 07:59 PM
Andy Brice wrote:
>I tried Javascript, but was horrified by the messy scoping and type
>rules. Ugh. But I hear Typescript is much better. Does it still have
>object-based (rather than class-based) inheritance, like Javascript?
TypeScript is not a realy different langauge, it is modern JavaScript + static typing. Just like modern JavaScript, it has a class keyword (mostly to accomodate Java programmers), but under the hood it is still all prototype-based. Anyway, programming in modern JavaScript or TypeScript is not really so horrible.
Posted by Lothar Scholz
Dec 20, 2020 at 03:09 AM
Christoph wrote:
> Anyway, programming in modern JavaScript or TypeScript is not really so horrible.
I think it is. Anyone saying otherwise has not maintained a large code base over a long time.
So it’s good for the throw away web culture where you rebuild your apps when a new framework comes along.