from wikipedia:
Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster
hardware doesn’t degrade, yet a lot of devices, that felt very snappy in the beginning, that are merely 5 years old feel outdated and slow, because if a trillion dollar corporation can’t be bothered to write a native application, and graces us with a control bar widget that’s an entire chromium browser, whose only purpose is to push two buttons, then very few others will be
on mobile, because developers are practically forced to write an app for absolutely everything, and there are easy to use tools available that will take your js and compile it into native components (like reactnative and nativescript), otherwise your app will be crippled, it is less pronounced on mobile in my opinion
on desktop, because you can write applications however you want, every bloody thing is in electron: chat apps, text editors, IDEs and even terminals and browsers (lol), it’s a complete disaster in my opinion, even a person like me, who wages holy war against electron apps, is forced to use a couple electron applications (looking angrily at you discord and zoom 😡)
the problem is that most people start with (and never go on from) javascript as their first (and final language), which is an interpreted language, made to be run in a browser, that was designed in like two weeks, and the expectations are sky-high (apps that utilize native components across five operating systems and two processor architectures), and the unfortunate result of these requirements is electron
there are some emerging solutions like extremely cross-platform flutter (but it’s not js) and there are now native macOS and windows targets for react native, but it’s rarely used
it seems like unless there will emerge some framework, that would magically sip out the project from the developer’s mind in js and transform it into native apps for ios, android, linux, macOS and windows, with zero modifications required from the developer, we have little hope, and such a framework would not only be a silly project, but also an effort of astronomical proportions
so we’re stuck with either iron grip control of corporations over mobile platforms that force everyone to write an app for everything, or with the freedom of the desktop, but we end up running 15 instances of chromium, not to mention the fragility of the web standards nowadays
what do you think?
Its an artificial / manufactured problem created by privatized / capitalist software development, as @yogthos@lemmy.ml has pointed out in a great recent post. Its not a real law, just part of the tendency to minimize labor costs by taking the path of least resistance by using bloated frameworks, and focusing only on features rather than performance.
The only answer IMO is to continue support open source projects and initiatives… we don’t have the same incentives as companies who seek profit above all else, and can take the time to clean up our code, focus on performance, privacy, interoperability… etc.
Capitalism (or any kind of performance-metric) values output over quality. The problem can either be solved by the consumer (lol) or by overcoming (maybe later) or subverting this system.
Copylefted free software has the power to do the later, as long as there is an active community that has a shared vision for the project and isn’t afraid to tell people to go fork themselves if they go against it. Maintainers should not only think about what they want but also about what they don’t want for their project to become and make that clear to users and contributers alike. (E.g. no DRM, no [proprietary service] etc.)
I know thats not an immediate solution (how to get my friends on linux if they can’t do x) but thats the whole point, doing it properly just takes longer. And you should take that time, instead of hacking together something subpar that gets turned into infrastructure by some idiot.