> The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit.
Please no. The pressure on us software developers to keep our bloat under control, particularly when better options than Electron become available, has to come from somewhere. There will always be people who can't afford to upgrade to the new baseline, and we shouldn't leave them behind if we can help it.
What better options than electron can we hope for?
Writing UIs in TypeScript with React is amazingly productive. A huge amount of effort has been invested into making that entire stack fast and it’s still a lot slower than I‘d want it to be. I’ve written some websites in Yew (react-like rust library), but either Rust or Yew seems to really suck for UI stuff. I feel like we’re missing some kind of nice middle-of-the-road language that’s both reasonably productive and results in reasonably performant apps. OCaml is the only language I know of that’s in that sweet spot, but there’s no UI libraries for it unless you go the ReasonML/react route, but then you’re just compiling to JS again.
If that pressure doesn't exist than why does it have to come from somewhere? I also run exactly 0 electron apps but definitely would like to have more ram - 64GB would give me some breathing room, 128GB would probably be optimal.
Some people can't afford to keep up with our upgrade treadmill. I'm trying to do my part to slow the treadmill down by voluntarily not upgrading my main PC, a 2016 laptop with a quad-core i7-6700HQ and 16 GB of RAM. I suspect that even that machine is too powerful. To really feel users' pain and develop my software in a way that minimizes it, I should probably be using a budget laptop with like 4 GB of RAM, an actual spinning HDD, and the typical Windows crapware still active, and do big compiles and other tasks that truly require more resources on a remote machine.
Please no. The pressure on us software developers to keep our bloat under control, particularly when better options than Electron become available, has to come from somewhere. There will always be people who can't afford to upgrade to the new baseline, and we shouldn't leave them behind if we can help it.