I feel that many times my source of fatigue can be traced back to my tools being laggy pieces of shit for no good reason.
I don't understand what prevents actors like Microsoft from doing a clean, lightweight, native rewrite of tools like Visual Studio for people who are looking forward into the .NET 5 horizon, and don't care about being able to debug VB.NET apps written in 2009. There is no reason there has to be any delay at all in the UI. Graceful degradation of intellisense is acceptable depending on project complexity, but there should never be any sort of perceptible hitching or delays when moving code windows around, scrolling, typing, switching tabs, minimizing/maximizing, etc. If my PC can display the complex 3d scenes of Overwatch at 2560x1440p@180FPS with <5ms input latency, I cannot comprehend any rational argument for my IDE being unable to achieve even 10% of that performance objective.
I understand that use of frameworks like ElectronJS make it virtually impossible to achieve my stated objectives, so perhaps we need to dust off some APIs and re-learn old tricks. Think about the aggregate developer hours that could be saved with 1 heroic implementation effort. Imagine if you could load a VS solution in less than a second and immediately start clicking through the UI in any direction without any fear that it is about to sandbag your ass with frustratingly-arbitrary UI delay soup. That is the kind of UX that inspires confidence and encourages a developer to charge forth, instead of compelling them to fuck off on HN for the 20th time of the day.
I can understand perhaps avoiding rewriting complex applications, but why are core components like the search, taskbar, and the settings app so dog slow? This stuff was new for windows 7 or 8. Still, if I type 'bluetooth' in the search bar it can take 10s to find the settings page by that name. Maybe part of the reason native apps have fallen out of favor lately is that the OS can't even provide an example of a modern performant one.
The taskbar and basic building blocks being slow is just because Microsoft doesn't give a shit anymore (and doesn't have to, given their near-monopoly). There's no good reason something that was fast in Windows 7 on a mid-range ~2009 PC is now slow as an old pig on machines orders of magnitude faster.
It appears that there is no Linux support planned as part of the Window+Mac React Native? That would be an absolute shame, as one of the benefits of Electron is that I can run VS Code, etc. on Ubuntu.
I'd gladly jump ship from Electron as soon as there's a viable alternative, but we can't forget that it's lack of cross-platform support that got us here in the first place!
I have been writing cross platform software since 1994, there was no Electron back then.
Electron as idea of shipping a full browser alongside the application has already been born multiple times, just it got luckier this time with the amount of devs that aren't willing to actually learn anything else.
Any solutions for cross-platform text editing + rich layouts? Afaik that's where native apps really run into trouble, as solo developers don't want to spend time re-inventing the wheel. (Nor should they have to). Especially on Linux, GTK applications really fall short of the Electron alternatives.
I'm building an Electron app based around ProseMirror, but would happily jump ship if there were a suitable cross-platform native solution.
Then use Qt, or do like we use to do back in the good old days, or as many still do on mobile space, wrap everything that can be made portable in C or C++ logic, using native views on top using MVVM patterns.
I don't understand what prevents actors like Microsoft from doing a clean, lightweight, native rewrite of tools like Visual Studio for people who are looking forward into the .NET 5 horizon, and don't care about being able to debug VB.NET apps written in 2009. There is no reason there has to be any delay at all in the UI. Graceful degradation of intellisense is acceptable depending on project complexity, but there should never be any sort of perceptible hitching or delays when moving code windows around, scrolling, typing, switching tabs, minimizing/maximizing, etc. If my PC can display the complex 3d scenes of Overwatch at 2560x1440p@180FPS with <5ms input latency, I cannot comprehend any rational argument for my IDE being unable to achieve even 10% of that performance objective.
I understand that use of frameworks like ElectronJS make it virtually impossible to achieve my stated objectives, so perhaps we need to dust off some APIs and re-learn old tricks. Think about the aggregate developer hours that could be saved with 1 heroic implementation effort. Imagine if you could load a VS solution in less than a second and immediately start clicking through the UI in any direction without any fear that it is about to sandbag your ass with frustratingly-arbitrary UI delay soup. That is the kind of UX that inspires confidence and encourages a developer to charge forth, instead of compelling them to fuck off on HN for the 20th time of the day.