With DDR5 RAM prices skyrocketing, some mid-range laptops could soon ship with budget-level specs. TrendForce expects companies like Dell and Lenovo to stock more notebooks with 8GB of memory. These reasonably priced options may no longer handle intense office and gaming tasks.
I am not a developer, so this is just speculation, but I think the current development community (outside of individuals with a personal interest in the topic) is largely incapable of developing efficient, well-optimized applications. Not that they don’t have the capability, but the broader industry ecosystem (on the consumer side) doesn’t exist in terms of efficient application development.
It’s all about velocity. Electron allows you to ship bullshit to multiple platforms REALLY fast because you only develop for the web, but get Windows, Linux and MacOS as a bonus.
Nobody wants to do C++ anymore, otherwise you could ship most things in Qt and get way better performance and still keep it cross-platform.
I understand that and I don’t have any illusions about things changing (short of major policy break in the EU that emphasizes that you can’t beat the Americans at their own game and you need to develop a novel approach that the Americans can’t compete with).
My counter argument is an application like QBittorrent. It’s an open source app with no budget, it’s cross-platform (including CLI and webUI, albeit MacOS support seems to be subpar due to lack of developers) and it is very efficient.
In the non-open source and/or Windows-only sphere, there is Mp3Tag, Notepad++, FastStone Image Viewer, Media Player Classic BE.
All very snappy applications, with a huge range of features/options (by the standard of consumer software) and they have the ability to handle large throughput.
Its a self fulfilling disaster. The vast majority of developers learn their skills in a company. Companies don’t want to pay for documentation. So developers don’t learn to properly document.
When I work with a client that doesn’t have a constraining standard for their product, they never ever want to pay for documentation.
When I work with a client that has to work with constraining standards, they want the strict minimum that will get them their cert.
Edit : forgot to add my closing point.
Having a good documentation will make coding a lot more efficient and easy and usually decent.
as a developer I approve of this message. from my own experience, 70% of devs write just about the worst code you could imagine.
and now, it’s even worse with AI.
A big problem is that developers will just make stuff work on their own machine, and they all have high spec machines lol
If a company forced all their developers to use dual core CPUs and 8GB RAM, you’d see more efficient code
It’s the companies forcing everything to be done super fast in the first place. You think any developers go out thinking “Hmmm, today I’ll create a really slow Electron application”? No, it’s management going “We need an MVP in 2 weeks, and then new features shipped every week after that”. So shortcuts are taken.
This.
Developers aren’t the ones making those decisions.
Try telling management that you don’t need one team of devs but 6 instead (one each for the Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS apps plus webapp), because you don’t just want to make one electron app that runs everywhere.
I am working on the backend for the apps for a large retailer. Since it’s an old app, we do have dedicated Android, iOS and Web apps. Since it’s a retailer, we at least don’t have to have Windows/Mac/Linux apps.
We have three separate frontend teams with about 20 people in total, because we essentially have to run three separate app projects. Since Android, iOS and Web have so hugely different tech stacks, there’s pretty much nothing that’s shared between these three apps. One’s made in Kotlin, one’s done in Swift and the website is in Typescript.
Senior management demanded that we cut some FTEs and fired the app team members for Android and iOS responsible for the ecommerce part of the apps and told us to instead use a webview. Now the other app devs are just waiting to get fired too once upper management figures out that the whole app can just be a webview.
Don’t tell us we devs are lazy or don’t know how to do our job. Complain about upper management that doesn’t want to invest into a real solution.
I can’t stand Android WebView apps, especially in retail. The whole point of installing a mobile app is to get a smoother experience than using the mobile webUI.
Believe me, all of us devs are on the same side. But convincing upper management that this warrants tripling development costs is not easy.