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[–] 86 points 11 months ago (16 children)

I was looking up how much RAM it would cost compared to a native WinUI 3 start menu in C++ and the difference is 20-100x for a hello world app. Having to load a JS and React Native runtime makes it load 150MB of RAM.

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Increase of available resources lead to so many sloppy solutions, one of the things I hate the most about modern software engineering.

    Current trend of shoving an llm everywhere is that on steroids. "No need to hardcode logic just MCP it bro"

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    In college, I was repeatedly told that optimization is a waste of time for the most part, and otherwise everything will run on servers soon with thin clients on the user side.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Performance doesn't matter until it's noticeable. After that it really starts to matter. The fact that any code can look sluggish on today's hardware means that either you're requesting a lot of data or the performance is trash.

    Performance does matter but only up to the point it becomes noticeable. On the server it really matters a whole lot more because every 2x performance is 50% hosting discount.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Not noticeable, until multiple apps in the background come into play, all with their own oversized runtimes. That's how we got into the electron app hell.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    Yeah, it really shows in the startup times. Too bad all the apps need some crazy specific version of the Electron wrapper otherwise it could be reused as a flatpak layer. Still, I prefer a supported electron app from the provider over no app at all or third party.

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  • [–] 48 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

    On a minimal freebsd setup you can run some graphical session in sway to monitor programs with top while activating vim's builtin autocomplete as ccls runs in the back and browse wikipedia using dillo to finally end with top showing a grand total of 145mb active ram. The entire OS is included in this.

    Wtf microsoft?

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  • [–] 24 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    My KDE install came to a grand total of 550MB last time I installed (KDE Neon at Plasma around 5.25 Ubuntu 22.04).

    The guy that greenlit it to be done in React Native is dumb as a rock. OSs comes with a shared UI library for a reason.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Wait, they're running an entirely separate js interpreter?

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, if they were trying to limit RAM usage they wouldn't have gone for React Native. The React Native runtime takes more RAM than the Hermes JS engine which is usually used.

    The thing I don't understand is why they didn't use C#, it's like right there, first class support for the WinUI stuff and made by them.

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago

    "The start menu demonstrates we can port all our essential frontend code to React Native. Today we announce a new translation layer that runs C# as react native code. There is no technical reason to do this which is why we had AI write it."

    • MS in 2026
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