alt Hacker NewsJavaScript is just about the worst thing ever and why would you use that as middleware for anything if you didn't have to? I mean, I get using Visual Studio Code, if you don't care about your business processes, intellectual property or engineers and are just outsourcing everything, but imagine actually trusting it for your coding stack like some kind of middle manager who only cares about cutting costs to the bone? Or like, you're riding the AI bubble and want to release some minimal viable product as fast as possible, but it's 2026 now. Covid was 6 years ago.
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nabeards • today at 3:26 PM
Nothing but snark in this comment. You can and should do better.
I'm a 25+ year C++ programmer, and what you're saying is nonsense. First, managing costs is an important part of engineering. More importantly, though, the use of browser engines for GUI apps isn't about JS but about the browser engine. These engines are among the best optimised and most sophisticated rich text layout engines we have. Even their high RAM usage is overstated. 1GB of RAM is 6% of the physical RAM on average hardware, and because these GUI apps are usually low-CPU, their RAM is mostly inert and can be swapped out without much impact, so really 1GB of RAM for such an app amounts to no more than 3% of the average personal machine's memory resources. Even if you can reduce that to zero, gaining 3% of memory in exchange for higher costs and compromising on presentation quality is often (not always!) a reasonable tradeoff from a pure engineering perspective.