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Reaper
Reaper

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Efficient Software vs Software that just works

I landed on this post today.

Link

This is a post from 2018 and I landed on this looking for a good way to build multi platform apps while maintaining a really small footprint. The arguments and discussions in its comments were hilarious and kinda pleasing it lead me to a rust based webview for pure web apps but on a desktop.

Anyway, was close to locking on programming the whole thing in C/C++ and use some abstractions to support all 3 platforms, and all this headache because, I realized that a lot of tools that I have installed are built with the chromium engine as a window layer with Electron on the top. A few to name would be VS Code, Postman, Spotify , WebTorrent which ended up taking a lot of space on my disk vs softwares like Sublime and Transmission that hardly take up any space and the only reason I don't use Sublime is because the packages I need are obsolete and need a little tweaking to get them to work. So I, just end up letting vscode eat my ram and battery.

For anyone else, the disk/ram/battery usage is important to me because I have a entry level Macbook Pro with just 121gb of user storage and that fills up quickly when you are a nodejs developer. Cause well, just 20 Repositories have over GB's worth of just node_modules and then I even decided to download XCode and Android Studio because someone wanted a Flutter and React Native application as well.

I agree with @tux0r and being a fellow minimalist it would be a nice if software was efficient and more focused on being performant while being small instead of

"Yeah, this library, that lib, add all of them up and ship it, if the user needs the software he'll download the 200GB installation candidate!"

Now, @tux0r 's argument was specific to websites being a huge ram hog
but in the comments he ends up supporting desktop apps for heavier tasks and most of the people end up supporting electron and JS as a language.

Now I know its not going to be ideal for business as they want everything quick and not always done right but a lot of us do build projects for fun and we should actually try to build something that is a lot faster to use while not being a ram hogger. Cause , a lot of people don't upgrade for a long time and they can't really enjoy the software you built.

On a different note, I'm still unable to decide what I should be doing for that multi platform desktop app I wanted to build...

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