Web 2.0 or: “Instead of loading all code from the same URL the website now needs a dozen of different scripts from a dozen of different URLs, gives a shit about CSP and only shows a blank page when JS and/or cookies are disabled.”
Don't worry, texteditor.com is also available as an app on Windows, macOS and Linux thanks to Electron.
It only needs 300 megabytes and you can style it with CSS.
It also only takes a single gigabyte of RAM per file being edited, Isn't that fantastic?
Oh I love electron
Man it's not lightweight, but damn, if CSS and JS isn't a really easy way to build cross platform UIs than other options like Qt. There's a reason why electron is so popular.
So was all this bloat inevitable as hardware got better, or is there a way to go back? It feels like a ripoff that our computers are 1000x better but they're maybe 10x faster once all the shitty software is taken into consideration.
Perhaps it's kind of inevitable to have some bloat. For example apps these days handle most of the languages just fine including emoji, LTR/RTL and stuff. Some have pretty decent accessibility support. They can render pretty complicated interface at 8k screen reasonably fast. (often accelerated in some way) There is a ton of functionality baked in - your editor can render your html or markdown side by side with source code as you edit it. You have version control, terminal emulator, language servers, etc..
But then there's Electron, which just takes engine capable of rendering anything and uses it to render UI, so as a result there's not much optimization you can do. Button is actually a bunch of DOM elements wrapped in CSS.. Etc.. It's just good enough for the "hardware is cheap" approach.
I think Emacs is a good example to look at. It has a ton of built in functionality and with many plugins (either custom configuration or something like Doom Emacs) you can have very capable editor very comparable to the likes of VS Code. Decades back Emacs had this reputation of being bloated, because it used Megabytes of RAM. These days it's even more "bloated" due to all the stuff that was added since. But in absolute numbers it does not need as much resources as its Electron based peers. The difference can easily be order of magnitude or more depending on configuration.
I have a few suggestions:
- Better education. Don't scare people who're learning programming away from the lower-level stuff, especially as people are even getting scared to use type declarations, not just the pointers (of which I was fearmongered with in college, as they told me Java is the future).
- Better portable APIs. Thanks to WebAssembly, one could easily have both something portable in a web browser and as a native desktop app, except instead we get browsers running said applications. I had some thinking about such a project, but then I remembered my iota project (a D-native replacement of SDL/SFML/GLFW, but without bloat by including standard library features), and then stopped thinking about it immediately, since a much smaller project already causes me too much headache. (Someone has a handy guide on win32 API? I have issues on getting certain messages produced, like input language change, and I don't know if I glimpsed over some functions that enable them and just weren't included in the documentation of the input language change event codes.)
nope. The bloat is there mainly because it makes the job easier for the devs.
In the short run, yes. In the long run, this just makes a bunch of coders that are now afraid of type declarations, because they were scared away from it with the "what if you have to choose?" tagline, thus making turning back to the proper way of doing things harder.
Of course! And it definitely does not try to pry all info about the user that it can and definitely the company behind would not use that in any way.
And then youll only need a near 16gb of ram to text a text file.
I'm not sure which is worse. I mean most desktop programs are just glorified web browsers anyway (i.e Electron)
What do you mean, "most?" Electron apps are the vast minority of desktop apps.
Electron apps are the vast minority of desktop apps.
"Not for long!" - Multiplatform programmers
They are probably referring to the amount of progressive web apps that are out now.
As long as you don't check the task manager.
by market share (vscode)
I mean look at the most used applications these days, discord, Spotify, teams, steam, vscode, slack, etc
They might not all exactly be electron but theyre all secretly browsers.
But you can use more shortcuts!
I hate editors in browser. With Chrome at least --kiosk
turns them in proper apps. In Firefox it's impossible to turn off browser shortcuts and use them to work.
What barbarian do they think I am, using a mouse to do stuff on my editor. I need long complex absurd keyboard shortcuts to function
Allow me to introduce: Firefox vim keybindings extensions. So many more shortcuts if you don't need to worry about typing characters in normal mode.
.exe? 🤮
Linux doesn't have a standard file extension for executable files, and that wouldn't have been good for this meme.
You can: ./texteditor
, ./bin/texteditor
, "texteditor binary", "(local) texteditor program".
.elf is the closest thing we have.
I hate elves. If I see any elves in my computer I'm throwing it in the forge.
Eh, .elf is more for really low level ELF files, so a program would just be named program, a kernel would be named kernel.elf
Oh they're just making a general point.
My gf did ask me why there wasn't an "exe" on my linux system though. But that's another story.
Is web3.0 just https://texteditor.exe?
Kind of. First you have to buy a Texteditor token and then the license says you're permitted to open the IPFS link in order to use Texteditor.
You missed the part where tokens are stolen.
Bruh, I actually prefer the "Web 2.0" solution. That way the god damn editor can't just start accessing all the shit on my drive.
Lol but included in the source for www.texteditor.com is analytics, beacons, etc from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Cloudfare, and a bajillion different ad networks that send the content of your text file to AI models.
My text editor doesn't access shit on my drive (unless I ask it to) because it's Free Software and my Linux distro package maintainers audit it to make sure it doesn't contain malware like that.
You're praising a pathological solution to a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with.
Forever audits of free software are unsustainable in my opinion.
To truly audit every piece of software, you need an independent party to spend time (often more than the development) to look through the code, that person needs to be equally or more experienced than the developers of the software, and have specific knowledge for vulnerabilities and malicious techniques.
They then need to audit and monitor all of the channels of distribution for that software, including various websites and repositories. This needs to be done constantly.
You effectively need to double or more the total level of effort for all software.
Yes, high profile software (sometimes) gets audited regularly, but the assumption that anything you grab from your package manager has been truly audited leads to a false sense of security, additionally the assumption that an audit being performed means there are no issues with the code also leads to problems.
The reality is that most open source software doesn't get audited because it is too much work.
I shamelessly use calculator.net instead of installing a calculator on my system lmao
you can also just g**gle your calculations
Use google to mean "web search" in general!
Let them loose their trademark over the name google by generalization!
Are you aware how much more electricity your calculation is consuming
Programmer Humor
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.