Messages

1

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: May 01, 2024, 07:16:12 PM »

I know you are not a web developer but I'll be blunt:

300mb of memory is a lot, sure, but guess what: I don't care.

The average smartphone has 4GB of ram. This means if the operating system takes up *half* of the RAM at any given moment, the user can run 6 apps simultaneously.

And that's on the average phone! No one is running these apps all at once!

Like I said previously, the ease of use and rapid deployment Annoying Oranges being able to multitask 1304 apps locally, which no one does. I wouldn't be suprised if in the future we saw a native OS/browser sandbox environment so apps don't have to ship with a web browser.

You know well that smartphones are not the devices we are talking about here. Nobody is going to gripe about devices which are by design not intended for multitasking. It's entirely apples and oranges.
On desktop will be running multiple applications (not including the 2 upwards of 3 digits worth of daemons/services that will be running in the background) all at once, most of which will not have the luxury of writing application state to disk when it's not in use. It simply does not work that way.

Having your webapp or website consume 100 MB to 2 GB of memory just because "everyone has at least x GB of memory" is absolutely inexcusable and is an awful mindset for any developer to have. It's also inconsiderate to the end-user because they will want to use other applications without having to throw down $250+ for a new set of 32 GB DIMMs. But as you said; you do not care.

This is an outdated stereotype from a time where ECMA standards didn't exist and the entire industry wasn't behind React. Web standards are very well documented and set in stone, a lot of the really annoying stuff is deprecated and Javascript is no longer the only language people develop with on the web. (I'll expand on this in my next point)Your idea that JS interpreters and HTML+CSS rendering is slow comes from another era, this is no longer the case. Web browsers have literally become one of the most optimized pieces of software ever made. I remember looking at the stats for how quickly JS has become in every engine available and being blown away by how far we've come. Your statement that "we should be looking for new replacements" is fairly ignorant because people have been pouring blood sweat and tears in optimizing the web. And guess what? You can run bytecode! You can run binaries!

And the fruits of the 3 have manifested in busy CPUs and monopolized memory space.

JS has been JITted to hell and back and yet still lags significantly behind other scripting languages like Lua and Squirrel. Sure, you can throw every last SIMD instruction, data-oriented design technique, -Ox flag, and inlined function at the problem for both the parsing and bytecode evaluation, but the end results still speak for themselves.

I still maintain that HTML+CSS are an awful bunch. Ever tried writing a parser for HTML? If not ask someone who has and ask if they had fun doing it. Better yet, interview people who have tried to parse it with regular expressions. DOMs in general are an awful way to lay out information on a screen. It worked well when simple static, linear pages ruled supreme, but is horribly inefficient for the dynamism of the modern web. CSS is just a giant band-aid to the problem.

And just because a bunch of developers put their blood sweat and tears does not exclude it from the consideration of replacement.
OpenGL was the arguably world-wide standard API for 2D and 3D rendering for years, and many man-hours were put into extending it and optimizing drivers for it, and worked well for what was required from it. Nonetheless effort was sought into a replacement that better matched modern hardware than the fixed-function pipelines it was originally intended for 30 years ago, which is how we got the infinitely better Vulkan API. You can say the exact same about the X Windowing System and Wayland too.

Every major browser supports WebAssembly! You can precompile any language and run it in a sandbox on the client-side just like JS.

WASM's IR is a step forward but still lags behind Oracle's Java bytecode and Microsoft's CIL from the few benchmarks I've seen. I don't hold it against that though, as it's still young and still has a lot more time to get better.

The reason apps are slow, is because companies prioritize profits and quick delivery over making good things. This is not unique to web development. It's just a lot more visible because people use the web a lot.

This was what I was trying to get at. Clearly there's a gap between the tools used and how they're actually being used, given the monument of issues plaguing web development. I doubt neither the developers or the companies are going to budge, so changing the tools to fit the demands of the modern web is the most clearest option, at least in my eyes.

I know I'm probably making enemies with all the web developers reading this. Sorry, I'm from the other side of town.

2

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: April 14, 2024, 09:15:15 AM »

snip

tbh as my domain is exclusively in native applications, I know nearly nothing about that field so I'll just take your word for it.

3

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: April 09, 2024, 09:32:01 PM »

the blind hate for electron apps in this thread is my pet peeve. Hating on electron because it's "bloated" and "uses a lot of memory" is an opinion only profoundly junior engineers who have never shipped anything can have.

Because those applications are bloated and do use a lot of memory. All the electron-based apps running on my system right now consume at least 300 MB of memory each.
I don't think that's entirely the fault of the end developers though because Electron itself is the issue, namely every app spinning up its own Chromium instance.

Does a rendering engine and an HTML, CSS, and a JS interpreter/JIT compiler use 300 MB of memory? I highly doubt it. If by chance they do, then I think it's high time to supersede these old standards.

The only thing that ever came close was the web, and it's here to stay and just gets better and better.

Idk one of the things keeping me far away from web development is the constant cyclical fad of new frameworks to solve the never-ending issues of web development - largely caused by the shortcomings of Javascript.

although there definitely is a problem with developers (in general, but as a web dev myself i feel entitled to say that it's especially bad in this field) simply not caring about software quality and performance and resource management. a degree of performance issues is caused simply by the use of these higher level languages which hide a lot of it from you, but i would venture to say that most of it is just because devs don't care enough.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate and say that if I was working as a web developer in an environment where the only thing that my manager/boss/employer cares about is getting a product to launch as quick as possible (especially with how cutthroat it is now) I probably wouldn't care much about performance either.
I think the only way around this is to change the tools and standards that can perform better in that kind of industry.

If even the best JS interpreters and HTML+CSS renderers are too slow then it's probably an issue with the languages themselves and we should start looking for a new replacement.
Maybe a scripting and a markup language that are quicker to parse and interpret? What about having them be compiled to bytecode and binary formats? Who knows.

4

Off Topic / Re: I found myself, also where did everyone go?

« on: March 26, 2024, 02:13:32 AM »

where did everyone go?

Everyone just moved on. There's only about 2 or 3 people still habitually talk here. It's more like a never-ending high school reunion now than an actual community.

Respectfully, I'm not sure why you are asking this. You were inactive for less than 2 years.

5

Off Topic / Re: Kalphiter

« on: March 26, 2024, 01:52:21 AM »

first im hearing this too

6

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: March 10, 2024, 03:26:14 PM »

we are talking about software engineering right? "whatever apple does tech companies follow", what's wrong with that? Apple did a lot of good things in software engineering believe it or not. Be precise in what specifically annoys you instead of being vague, saying "Apple bad" doesn't mean anything and reflects some ignorance on the subject.

I'm not sure where you are coming from. I never once suggested or implied Apple does not contributing anything to software engineering. It had nothing to do with that at all. You vehemently defending the company when I was directly critiquing every other company speaks a lot more how you view Apple than I do.

Be precise in what specifically annoys you instead of being vague, saying "Apple bad" doesn't mean anything and reflects some ignorance on the subject.

I understand that English may not be your first language, so please understand that when I say "no matter how stupid" both does not mean and is far removed from "this company only produces bad software and/or products and I hate it" or however you are interpreting it.

7

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: March 02, 2024, 01:59:26 PM »

sorry that's not software engineering but typical blind Apple hatred

How did you possibly conflate tech companies blindly following whatever Apple does with "blind Apple hatred?"

if you're unable to recognize the contributions they've made to the industry for the past decades, then perhaps you need to delve deeper into the subject

Apple does release excellent things every year for the development on their own platforms along with their own API kits which sometimes are very innovative and opens up new use cases, apart from 1. the whole App Store situation where they are reckless and we can all agree on that, 2. the fact they remove support of old software (not hardware) a bit too quickly in some cases

What the hell are you talking about

8

Off Topic / Re: Software engineering trends that annoy you

« on: February 27, 2024, 02:13:18 AM »

For decades whatever Apple does no matter how stupid becomes the next trend other tech companies will mindlessly chase.

9

Off Topic / Re: Bushido passed away

« on: January 18, 2024, 07:01:54 AM »

Bushido was an absolute legend in this community.

Rest in peace, Bushido

10

Off Topic / Re: You know, at least Blockland never advertised for Home Depot

« on: December 29, 2023, 04:10:04 AM »

does it really need an industry though? we still have blockhead research

I think having a small industry is a good enough line to draw, given that nothing on the Internet is sacred enough to not have at least some research of it.

11

Off Topic / Re: You know, at least Blockland never advertised for Home Depot

« on: December 28, 2023, 02:35:29 AM »

I've told my friends that Blockland died with most of its dignity as it never developed a small industry of 3D animated research like Roblox and Minecraft where it's just cube primitives smashing against each other.

12

General Discussion / Re: old Team Deathmatch saves

« on: December 12, 2023, 12:28:42 AM »

God I loved TDM and CTF servers growing up, they were and still are my favorite gamemode. It's a real damn shame that they died out long ago.

13

Off Topic / Re: Personal Text:Yolo, I'm Solo.

« on: November 22, 2023, 04:01:26 AM »

i took a nasty stuff this morning that clogged my toilet. you should've seen it

14

Off Topic / Re: what do greek2me/ravencroft's avatars look like?

« on: November 06, 2023, 06:58:14 AM »

Off the top of my head I know that by jumping off the slope of tree bricks, you can rapidly accelerate to a point as long as you keep jumping and holding down W. Your jump height will be low but you'll move pretty quickly for a short while.
When friction begins takes over you will begin to decelerate and your jump height will return to normal. As far as I can this mostly works on flat surfaces, as hitting a wall or falling a few bricks will return your speed and jump height to normal. My guess is this is a quirk with max player velocity where you are trading horizontal speed for vertical speed.

It's pretty fun, sometimes I'll load up Beta City and mindlessly do this.

15

Off Topic / Re: I keep opening the forum to see if there's anything new and interesting on here

« on: October 29, 2023, 03:44:41 AM »

Same here, I don't have the site bookmarked but it always shows up as the 3rd item in my address bar.

I wish I stuck around more like you did and made some lasting friends here. At some point in my teenage angst I "left" the forum for the good part of 3 or 4 years or something like that, and removed anyone associated with the forum from my Steam friends list. While I did make a lot of friends in high school that I still talk with regularly today, it'd be nice to know someone I've known since I was a kid to reminisce about our time here.

Unrelated, and you may not remember it but I remember sending you a hate PM a long time ago way-back-when your Night Fox account was still fresh. Something along the lines of "furries bad, go back to your old one". Either way, I sincerely apologize for that and I wish you well.