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bonessstoday at 3:05 PM1 replyview on HN

If you account for dev time, ‘giving up’ and just doing it in a web renderer is totally valid. Choppier, more memory, bad if the device is failing, but 98% of the time that can be acceptable.

Native GUI dev, tho, can enable low-resource performant apps just by sticking the rudimentary OS is a way no higher app really can, and with capabilities that’d choke a web app. Load up a listbox with a few tens of thousands of items with custom rendering… as a fat client dev you’re only in a little trouble, on the web googlers making google apps force pagination a whole lot.

As a point of comparison: WPF was Microsoft’s attempt to nail the ‘best of the desktop & best of the web’ [And I would argue they effectively nailed it, as a specification.]. But, as a brown belt WPF dev and a blue/orange belt with Win32/MFC, the extra overhead related to WPF broke common scenarios we’d never think twice about on the true native side. The web was made for sharing Robotech technical manuals, OS GUI’s to pump all the rectangles as fast as hardware allows. Apples and oranges.


Replies

CharlesWtoday at 3:32 PM

> If you account for dev time, ‘giving up’ and just doing it in a web renderer is totally valid.

For sure, all software is chock full of "best? no/works? yes" compromises. I object to the framing of "I couldn't figure it out, therefore TextKit 2 does not play well with anything modern", which is a very silly conclusion.