alt Hacker News> a UI that doesn't jank and max out the CPU
While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help.
I mean, look: the most complicated, stateful and involved UIs most of the people commenting in this thread are going to use (are going to ever use, likey) are web stack apps. I'll name some obvious ones, though there are other candidates. In order of increasing complexity:
1. Gmail
2. VSCode
3. www.amazon.com (this one is just shockingly big if you think about it)
If your client machine can handle those (and obviously all client machines can handle those), it's not going to sweat over a comparatively simple Electron app for talking to an LLM.
Basically: the war is over, folks. HTML won. And with the advent of AI and the sunsetting of complicated single-user apps, it's time to pack up the equipment and move on to the next fight.
Replies
> While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help.
From the person you're responding to:
> I would guess a moderate amount of performance engineering effort could solve the problem without switching stacks or a major rewrite.
Pretty clearly they're not saying that this is a necessary property of Electron.
Using the terminal in vscode will easily bring the UI to a dead stop. iterm is smooth as butter with multiple tabs and 100k+ lines of scrollback buffer.
Try enabling 10k lines of scrollback buffer in vscode and print 20k lines.
You think VSCode’s ui is more complicated than eg Microsoft Excel? Or am I misunderstanding?
You might try giving an example of a complex UI that isn't a frustratingly slow resource hog next time you're posting this rant.
I actually avoid using VSCode for a number of reasons, one of which is its performance. My performance issues with VSCode are I think not necessarily all related to the fact that it's an electron app, but probably some of them are.
In any case, what I personally find more problematic than just slowness is electron apps interacting weirdly with my Nvidia linux graphics drivers, in such a way that it causes the app to display nothing or display weird artifacts or crash with hard-to-debug error messages. It's possible that this is actually Nvidia's fault for having shitty drivers, I'm not sure; but in any case I definitely notice it more often with electron apps than native ones.
Anyway one of the things I hope that AI can do is make it easier for people to write apps that use the native graphics stack instead of electron.