Comments by "" (@pierreollivier1) on "Is Electron really that bad?" video.

I think Electron should be used by companies or people who don't have the means or the need for true native app. The problem is that Electron allows too many Lazy developer to make shitty software. VScode is just embarrassing, we have Tflops of power, recent CPU's have SSE extension with a minimum of 128bit width, mine has AVX512, I can do as much as 64 * 8 bits of processing per clock cycle, for each core, we have Mbs of cache, most computers have between 16 and 128gb of Ram nowadays. We have GPU's that are more powerful than most Super computers 15y ago. Yet somehow VScode can't do 120fps, it can't updates it's UI in real time, it can't do syntax highlighting well, it doesn't let me move my cursor fast enough. WTF ??? And that's entirely on the lazy companies and the lazy developers that just simply aren't good enough to make decent software. This is why I will never use an IDE, it's not that I don't think that they are useful or that I think that TUI's are better, but it's simply that the current IDE's are just trash, they just are terrible.
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that's an excuse, for lazy devs, and poor architecture. Look at something like Ghostty, they've managed to make native rendering on the set of platform they support, sure you sometimes can't have certain features due to platform specific things. But most apps can and it doesn't take much works if you have a modular architecture that abstracts away the rendering/windowing management, 95% of the features that you may implement would be easily doable in a platform agnostic way.
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that's a C++ problem but programming language like Zig or Rust, solves that problem with their good build system. The reason C++ is so bad for native Gui is because the tooling around C++ is just terrible. The build system is bad, the dependencies are bad. It's a shit show. But with Rust and Zig, you can soft fork those C/C++ library, integrate them with the proper build system and create a package that you can later fetch and build on all platforms.
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@josephvictory9536 You give me the 30M of the annual VScode dev team, I fire the team, and I implement it from scratch, using vulkan, tree-sitter, and I will even embed a JS Runtime.
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@Descent098 It doesn't have to be native, or have the same features, I mean it's very app dependent but for something where performance and latency matters, it's simply unacceptable to not develop using a native solution. The truth is not a whole lot of people really care about speed and latency otherwise VScode wouldn't be used by anyone.
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@ Also I don't belive that most features parity problem are related to the OS, all major OS expose libc, yes it might differ on tiny edge cases, but not enough to justify not adding a rules in your build script to link the libraries and to cross-compile for the target. doing Cross-platform code is really not that hard.
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@Descent098 Exactly, Like if you just want a quick and easy desktop app cross-platform and the app isn't really complex and it's not even that important if it's really snappy and reactive, or you have a small team or a small budget, than yes Electron is really fine by me. But if you are a billion dollar company like Microsoft, that you are literally a company that sells, Freaking proprietary kernel code (aka Windows), but you are telling me that they went with Electron for VScode ? Like It's embarrassing like most of their products, but 2006 Visual Studio, booted in a fraction of a seconds. Everything was snappy and fast, mind you it was freaking 2006 hardware. But now 19 years later we basically have super computers at home. Microsoft is literally one of the biggest company one the planet, recruiting top notch talents across the world, And you are telling me that those guys can't even be bothered to make a native cross-platform editor ? Like VScode is the app I have in mind, it's just so slow, there is no excuse for that, I'm not even asking for much, but not having my UI update in real-time when I change code, is just straight up disrespectful for all of the engineers at AMD and Intel and there is no amount of money that will make me use that piece of trash, when I need to help someone, if they only have vs code, I'll open note, or text edit, or vi, just to make sure I don't ever touch that embarrassment. In absolutely zero parallel universe should a vanilla text editor, doing absolutely jack shit, take 1gb to 1.5gb of memory doing nothing, and if for some reasons it actually need all that memory it better be a thousand times more responsive that it currently is. To me VScode is probably the absolute worst app for Electron.
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@Descent098 No for sure, there are legit cases where you using Electron or some other kind of cross-platform backend might be useful and beneficial. But Take VScode for example, it's a bloody text editor, there is literally zero features that you can't implement on basically anything with an os and a file system. Every major OS has a C api, every one of them support a C compiler. But if we are talking about more edgy stuff, like VR/AR, AI, Decoding/Encoding, etc then sure I expect to find differences across different versions.
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@Descent098 No for sure VScode has it's merit, I'm not saying it's not doing usable to solve problem, and despite my tone this is not an attempt at burning a church to say that mine is better. I really don't care what people use, I know what I want and care about, but I also understand that people are different and some might not be bothered by the things that I noticed when trying VScode. But for some context I use an editor called Helix. It's very much like Neovim, except its' written in Rust, and is basically a Neovim with all the plugins you would want, but written in native language. So it's like 15/20 mb peak RSS, and everything is just as it should be, on our modern computers, meaning instantaneous. ? you want to fuzzy find from your root directory ? instant. You want to quit and open 50 files, quit and reopen them all ? instant. Want to have multiple lsp ? instant. Fuzz your millions of LOC codebase ? instant. And again not saying that to say it's better, not everybody cares about it, but it's why when I see something like VScode, it's just out of this world, like I just can't fathom what is happening to that poor silicon when you decide to open VScode.
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