I think the point about tooling being the problem deserves more emphasis. I'm a firm believer that the right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do. Currently, the easiest place to innovate is at the top of the stack, using web technologies and languages like JavaScript.
You can see this with languages like Rust and Go—they're some of the first low-level programming languages with actually good tooling, and, as a result, they're becoming very popular. I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.
If you want your language/library/framework/layer in the stack to become popular, make the tooling good and make it easy for folks to get their questions answered. Everything else will follow.
Most of the time it's genuinely much easier to use Rust or Go than to use Python or Node because the tools are just so much better. This is why I don't like judging "high level" or "low level" by some perceived position in the stack. All I care about is how well it lets me express my intent as a programmer.
> and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.
Maybe it's just me, but that right there is the stuff of nightmares. What library, and written by who, is it going to pull in.
But what's changed is decisively not "Now I don't know which libraries will be used or who made this library" but instead "The library I wanted was easier to get because the tools work".
Agreed. I don’t think easy package management is the problem, though. Rather, it’s just triggered a Cambrian explosion of packages, and now security needs to catch up.
> a gigantic manual that lists every property of the system in excruciating detail, which is totally worthless for learning and barely usable as reference.
It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
> low-level tools are terrible too
It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.
> We could have editor plugins and language servers to help beginners along
> It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
I guess it's like a dictionary: it's only useful if you know the word you want to look up, rather than reading through every definition until you find the function/library/ability that you want. I do agree though, when I need to look something up, I do want it in great detail - it just isn't a very good learning resource.
> It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.
Can you give some examples? The author made a compelling argument on how easy it is to use the browser debugger. I would be of great interest for something similar.
> We already have all that.
I've only seen these for simple python applications or web development, never in any 'low level' space. And certainly not for doing anything interesting in the low level space (something that is not just a C++ language tutorial).
I think the original article wasn't just proposing the existence of language servers, but specifically that they (that do exist) should be used to help beginners to make the process of low level software development approach the level of ease as web development with it's tooling.
I'm not quite sure what they would look like in practise.
As a reference, yes, when you already have the context. But you need a guide. In fact, that's also the function of a doctoral advisor, to help you navigate a subject matter.
To be clear, I also appreciate good reference. But reference is bad to learn from, and frankly a big PDF is not even a very usable reference resource when compared to, say, MDN.
As for lack of familiarity, I am certainly not some grizzled 80s Unix veteran, but if you're comparing the Chrome or Firefox dev tools vs. `perf`, it's no contest. Browser dev tools help devs build an accurate mental model of what their software is doing. It is extraordinarily rare to find command-line tools or other low-level tools that are well designed enough to do this. (Maybe Superluminal now? Tracy?)
> It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
This is one of those "there are N types of people in the world". I'm with you, a detailed reference is the ideal scenario, but there seem to be many people who don't find that useful given their knowledge acquisition style.
Not any reference, though, but a specific style of one: A reference mostly written as a box-ticking exercise, written more for the writer than the reader. I like manpages, but the microcontroller manuals rarely reach those lofty heights.
I think the real conclusion is: someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck. (Yeah Qt exists, but it really sucks...) Until then, everyone will default to just using the browser for a desktop app, and the beatings will continue.
Because of this, I'm really looking forward for PanGUI to step up (https://www.pangui.io/), their UI framework is very promising and I would start using it in a heartbeat when the beta actually releases!
> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck
This is exactly what we're trying to do with Slint (https://github.com/slint-ui/slint
).
It’s a native, cross-platform UI framework for desktop and embedded (Rust/C++/Python/JS), with no browser runtime
Why do you think Qt sucks? Other than the C++ focus, and basically the framework's decision to make you use everything they give you, which is controversial.
But apps made with Qt as an end product don't think suck. Qt is a fully featured and modern and high quality framework.
I agree. Modern Qt is great - you get the performance of C++ and the ease of use (simpler than React!) of creating UIs in QML. I've built my note-taking app with a from scratch block editor[1] (like Notions's) with it. Now working on a mobile version[2]. Also working on a LLM client[3]. And working on a library that will simplify and help others build such apps easily - which is my solution to the original article author's problem.
Yes! I'm not using Qt's built-in components like StackView, but reimplementing them from scratch to better support swipe gestures, etc so they feel native-like.
Apps made with qt are mostly good but the engine sucks hard indeed. The programming is difficult, let's say compared to GTK, the SDK interface change totally every couple of years forcing apps to rewrite everything from scratch. Probably related to that, the documentation is splitted in an hundred places, often undecipherable between what is obsolete or for current version. Most parts of the framework are not really documented anyway, there is just automatically generated reference guide from the code that is missing most part that is needed. Like you have an option name, now what does it mean? What this option to be used for? It's hard to extend simply to bypass default behavior of the SDK that could be limiting. Let me not speak of the whole qml craziness and the qtuieditor... And the worse of it is that the license is (or was because I don't know recent evolution) totally shitty. Like free to use in that case and that case, and commercial in that case and that case. No one serious would like to build something on a private garden like that.
I have yet to find a cross-platform UI framework that really feels native on Gnome. The reality is that there is no shortcut for native UI on all platforms, you have to use the “official” framework (e.g. GTK for Gnome). In my opinion the only softwares that should use a custom framework are professional grade apps where custom workflows can’t fit the native UI (e.g. Blender). Despite all the noise about native cross-platform frameworks, it’s absolutely not fooling anyone, we can spot this immediately on any platform.
> I have yet to find a cross-platform UI framework that really feels native on Gnome. The reality is that there is no shortcut for native UI on all platforms, you have to use the “official” framework (e.g. GTK for Gnome).
The alternative to cross platform frameworks that do not feel completely native on all platforms is to use browsers for desktop apps which do not feel native on any platform. They do not even have similar UIs to each other.
We would be better off using imperfect cross platform frameworks rather than sticking everything in the browser.
I think part of the reason this happens is that users accept it because they are used to web apps so do not expect consistency.
This correct. What's actually needed is a modernized wxWidgets. The goal of the GUI framework should be to find an architecture that is maximally compatible with the native Windows, GTK, QT, Mac OS UI frameworks/libraries plus a simple way to accommodate minor platform differences.
IDK, it seems like old reddit did just fine without even trying that hard. The DOM and surrounding JS API is already a high level GUI framework, and the post illustrates that it's perfectly capable of doing useful interactions >60fps. I personally love working with native code, but the modern browser is capable of producing fast interfaces that saturate human senses without it. If you write JS like a C programmer would, it will usually be quite fast, even if it's not optimal. If you write native apps in C++ like a modern JS programmer - frameworks and deps with abandon - it will be a stuttery mess.
When the DOM is not enough, there's already WebGL and WASM. A vanishingly small sliver of use cases can't saturate human senses with these tools, and the slowest, jankiest websites tend to be the least deserving of them (ie: why is jira slow? It's literally a text box with a handful of buttons on the side!).
> (ie: why is jira slow? It's literally a text box with a handful of buttons on the side!).
Despite me agreeing with your overall point, this is such a ridiculous comment to make. You and I both know Jira is much much more than that. Reductive things like this just turn off people who would otherwise listen to you.
Has somebody written an analysis why Qt really sucks? It would be great to have a spec for a GOOD cross-platform (desktop) UI framework. It might be also possible to create a reference implementation of that spec on top of Qt.
> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck
That's the browser, native ui development failed because it didn't want to lose money on cross platform compatibility, security, or user onboarding experience.
The web is fast enough for 99% of UIs, the story is not about using web, the story is about using the web poorly. old.reddit is not qt.
There's Lazarus / FPC. Fast, small. Extremely quick compiler. The language has its warts but very readable and relatively simple yet powerful. Uncool and treated like a relic though
They're making the initial version with C#, but they have plans to make the library language-agnostic. Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.
>Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.
>someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck.
You can't. At best it will shine on one platform and be mediocre on all the others. At worst it will be mediocre everywhere. There are too many differences between Windows, macOS and the various Linux desktops. That's before you start thinking about mobile.
PanGUI seems to be interesting. However being mobile ready would matter a lot for adoption and I couldn't see anything on their sites regarding mobile platforms.
I don’t think it makes sense to use the same framework for desktop and mobile apps. That gives you either terrible desktop apps or terrible mobile apps. Put the business/backend logic into a shared library, but build separate mobile and desktop apps on top of it.
Not bad for mobile apps, but still sucks a lot for desktop support.
Also, really wished they've opted for a more general language like C# rather than Dart - but that's inevitable since Google needed to make use of their Dart language after they've failed to standardize it on the Web (and I think they don't want to use a language developed by Microsoft of all companies)
They've picked Dart because it was the only language that could have small aot binaries, hot reload capable runtime without compromise and most importantly because they could influence development of the language.
C# is one of the worst choices they could make at the time.
Yeah good point. Although C# nowadays has good AOT support, that wasn't the case in the early days of Flutter (Google could have collaborated with Microsoft to develop this, but why would they?...)
I don't think so, I think that some teams at Google were trying hard to push Dart that no one wanted. And so Flutter was about to create a framework that was supposed to be the main and only one for Android app and co in the future (at that time) to force us on switching to Dart.
Sorry, made a typo with 'gave' -> 'have'. But the point stays , why would C# be (one of) the worst choices here (when C# has small AOT binaries, hot reload etc)?
The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all.
I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development, but so far they've focused most of their efforts on mobile and I don't think this will change in the future.
Absolutely, they need Qt in order to design and theme a UI that actually doesn't look terrible (They already had good experience in porting Musescore from vanilla C++ Qt5 to QML widgets, so I think they'll use a similar system for Audacity)
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development
I really don't think there is any broad future for Flutter. Requiring adoption of a new programming language is making an already an uphill battle even steeper, and the way they insist on rendering websites in a single giant canvas is... ugh
> The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all.
That's not consensus. I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that. It forces one to build the entire app in C++, and that's because, although open-source, its design revolves around the needs of the paying customers of Trolltech: companies doing multi-platform paid apps.
I want a graphical toolkit: a simple library that can be started in a thread and allows me to use whatever language runtime I want to implement the rest of the application.
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development
Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.
> I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that.
Yes, that is the consensus of why Qt sucks - it's a massive framework that tries to do everything at the same time with a massive toolset of in-house libraries. This is inherently tied to the revenue model of the Qt Company - sell custom modules that work well with the Qt ecosystem at a high enterprise-level price. I also wish to just use the "good" parts of Qt but I can't, since it already has a massive QtCore as its dependency.
However, there is still no cross-platform framework except for Qt that can actually do the most important things that a desktop framework actually needs: an actual widget editor, styling and theming, internationalization, interop with native graphics APIs (though I have gripes with their RHI system), etc. That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha.
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development
>> Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.
Yeah, but at that time I thought this was at least better than wrangling with Qt / QML. You can write the core application logic ("engine" code) in C++ and bind it with Dart. There are already some companies I've seen gone a similar route with C# / WPF.
As far as I can tell, PanGUI is a drawing library not a graphical toolkit. Its primitives are geometrical, not widgets. Its showcase is an audio app, which is as far away as possible from a boring productivity application that I'd like to do.
In my university days I was very much into GUIs, and I've written apps with wxWidgets, plain Gtk 1 and 2, GNOME 2, Qt, Tk, GNUstep and even some fairly obscure ones like E17 and FTLK. For my tastes, the nicest ones were probably GNOME2, Elementary and wxWidgets. Especially GNOME2, which had a simple builder that let me create the basic shell of an app, with some horizontal and vertical layout boxes that I could later "hydrate" with the application logic.
>That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha
They say it's in beta and it seems anyone can sign up for the beta.
No. Any forced runtime is bad because overall it will have few users. The ideal is a C library with the API described in some IDL that allows mechanical generation of bindings for all language runtimes.
I really like the sentiment here, and Handmade Network has such a cool vibe, but I can't help but think that he/they would have a bigger impact by focusing more on illustrating to people how this mindset leads to value and less on teaching and learning the skills.
>Building it yourself might sound crazy, but it’s been done successfully many times before—for example, Figma famously built their app from scratch in WASM and WebGL, and it runs shockingly well on very large projects.
Yes, let's hear more about this. "Collapsing Reddit comments could have been like 180ms faster" isn't very convincing to smart, ambitious people deciding what they want to be about. Find more examples like Figma and get people to believe that there's still lots of room for up and comers to make a name for themselves by standing on their performance, and they'll take care of the learning and building themselves.
> If you have heard of the Handmade community, you likely think...
I think that "the Handmade community" are people who mistook Casey for a messiah, in a sort of "Life of Brian" scenario.
The best part of "Handmade" is when somebody who'd otherwise doubt their ability makes a video game. The resulting games are usually at least interesting, and video games are art so, interesting is enough. If Steam had a dozen interesting crap games for every asset-flip cash-grab piece of junk it would have a very different reputation.
The worst part of "Handmade" is the mob of people who can't and won't make useful software but feel Casey (and much worse Jon Blow and Ginger Bill) has given them permission to criticise anybody who does because the software didn't meet their sky-high expectations.
I think as typical niche Internet "communities" do, the most vocal will naturally be snobby elitists who deride at anything that doesn't fit in their narrow worldview, and that mob will naturally represent the "community". (I also think Jon Blow has his part in enabling that, but oh well.)
But I'm still impressed what Casey was able to organize during the past few years, it's clear that what he's published as educational material (Handmade Hero, Computer: Enhance) has invigorated interest in low-level programming. Even though there might not be immediate results, I think this will matter later on when the people who grew up with these materials will now build new infrastructure for the post-Web era.
Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.
E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....
Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....
> Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem.
Not quite. The path to high level always involves abstractions that fit the problem. There is still room for a decision to replace high-level with low-level in some very specific bits of a hot path, but that decision also takes into consideration the tradeoffs of foregoing straight-forward high-level solutions with low-level versions that are harder to maintain. The sales pitch to push code that is harder to maintain requires a case that goes way beyond performance arguments.
I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality to your goal in a way that is both economical and is very good at reaching the stated goal.
Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.
In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.
Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?
It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).
I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.
> I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality
I'd phrase it differently: Civil engineering is fundamentally about understanding trade-offs within hard constraints. You have materials of known strength, known wear, and known properties (compression vs shear). It's boring by default because the physics don't budge.
A lot of software engineering, web and SaaS development in particular, hasn't had to confront comparable resource limitations. For decades we've had (for practical purposes) an infinitely fast calculator, practically infinite supply of active working data and and infinite amount of them to chain together. So, without constraints people have just run wild.
But here's where it gets interesting from my perspective: when you point out the resulting bloat (200ms to open a Reddit comment), many developers will defend it not as a technical failure but as correct business prioritisation. "User hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive" or "users will upgrade their devices anyway"—essentially externalising the performance cost onto users rather than absorbing it as an engineering constraint.
That's the fundamental difference. An automotive engineer can't build a 20-tonne car and tell customers to buy stronger roads. But we absolutely can ship bloated software and tell users to buy faster computers, more bandwidth, better phones. And for a long time, we've got away with it.
The question is whether that's still sustainable, or whether we're approaching the limits of what users will tolerate.
I think the main issue is lack of competition. If company A makes a 10% worse car that costs 10% more than company B, they very quickly go out of business.
There is no 'Reddit 2' substitute product (or indeed for lots of software), and network effects tend to dominate, so your benchmark is 'is it bad enough so people would rather use nothing than your product', which is a very low bar to clear.
Spot on. And it's worse than that: you're not choosing between a 10% slower product and a faster alternative, you're choosing between a slow product and losing access to everyone still using it. That's not a market choice, it's a hostage situation.
We can see this works in reverse: developer tools, CLIs, and local apps where network effects don't apply (ripgrep over grep, esbuild over webpack) performance actually matters and gets rewarded. Developers switch because they can switch without losing anything. But Instagram users can't switch to a lighter alternative without abandoning their social graph.
This is why the "developer time is expensive, user hardware is cheap" argument only works in the absence of competition. In genuinely competitive markets, efficient code becomes a competitive advantage worth investing in. The fact that it's "not worth optimising" is itself evidence of market power, not sound economics.
Your automotive analogy actually understates it: imagine if switching to a better car meant your old car's passengers couldn't ride with you anymore, and that's closer to what we're dealing with.
Network effect is basically the same thing as urban agglomeration in real life. The value of a city is from all the people aggregating together to provide goods and services and people are worrying about the housing crisis.
So what is the correct solution to all of this? I would be tempted to reach for a land value tax except this doesn't really apply to cyberspace. The only "land" is built by the platform themselves, but at the same time the platform isn't solely responsible for all the value generated on the platform. So, maybe we should tax network effects.
A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.
The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.
Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.
In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.
When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.
I think the argument you present here makes an MBA kind of sense, but with the benefits of hindsigh, we know exactly what sort of costs this encurred.
People hated the redesign, and stuck with the old reddit UI as much as possible. The company lost a ton of benevolence. Alternative frontends sprung up overnight, which used the API.
Management was probably faced with the dilemma that if new features were only developed for the new UI, a significant chunk of the userbase would not get to use them.
This was probably one of the major factors on the decision from Reddit to kill the API, which created a ton of negative sentiment, some of it probably lingers to this day.
I'm sure a lot of people were either driven away entirely or significantly reduced the amount and quality they posted. While numerically small in number, we know that most of the quality content comes from very few people.
Reddit might have more users now than any time before in history, but I'd argue user satisfaction and engagement is lower than the days before, and the quality of the content and discussion to be had means most people don't bother.
> At the big tech firms, there are engineers looking for software fixes that make tiny efficiency improvements that can save lots of money at scale.
Meanwhile, Google and Apple look for whatever ways they can to improve battery life on their phones.
While this is true for parts of these companies, I think the user experience with their products makes it clear that the performance focus only goes in a very select few areas.
Perhaps my favorite Google example is the absolute dogshit performance of Google Home devices. By any objective metric, these are fairly capable computers (quad-core arm64 processors) running a tiny number of apps and yet their UI is still incredibly sluggish. Better yet, these are basically the only real-world devices that run Fuchsia - they should be shining examples of the performance of a brand new OS and yet they are anything but.
I know this article is largely about too many js frameworks and also a call to making better tooling for low-level programming.
But it is also largely about the fact that most people making those js frameworks are not low-level programmers.
Folks really ought to check out Datastar. It's a newish js framework that is extremely innovative despite leaning as much as possible on browser apis. It's htmx + alpine + much more, yet smaller, faster and simpler.
Because it is built by a low-level programmer who is making the framework as a yak shaving side-quest. There's no dependencies - he built his own (world's fastest) signals and DOM morphing algorithms. V1 should be released soonish and they expect to never need a v2 - it'll just work forever (and probably become slimmer as browser capabilities grow).
And when he needs a break from that, he develops innovative approaches to CSS, serialization protocols, and databases.
Just my point of view but I like the vibe of the htmx creator but think that htmx sucks to use it more than for a demo case.
If the guy was not cool and posting fun memes, no one would even look at that.
You go backward in term of performance by forcing a constant stream of heavy content between the app and the backend, state is hard to manage, The backend would have again to take charge of the CPU intensive part of the app for users. The framework is limiting by trying to be very simple, fitting tags and hiding the complexity to the dev (in an "automagic" way). But that is the worse as, as soon you want to deviate from the main documented highway case, it will become nightmarish.
Are you replying to the right comment? Mine was about datastar, not htmx.
Though, you seem to be arguing against hypermedia in general - a stance which is just plain wrong in most cases. Htmx's essays and book do a good job of addressing why.
I'd say it's not in between so much as subsumes both, and then does even more. While being smaller, faster and simpler. Htmx v4 (in beta) will close the gap by becoming a heavier datastar-lite with idiomorph and sse built in, but no signals, SDKs, and just all-round polish and back-to-front integration.
I feel like I'm somewhere on that Venn diagram O:-)
The specific examples in the article are about UI.
I agree that UI ecosystem is a big and slow mess, because there is actually a LOT of complexity in UIs.
I would even argue that there is often more complexity to be found in UIs than in backends (unless you are working on distributed systems, or writing your own database).
On backend, you usually just need paralellism (95% of jobs is just parallel for, map-reduce kind of thing).
But in UI, you need concurrency! You have tons of mutable STATE flying around that you need to synchronize - within UI, across threads or with the backend.
This is /hard/ - and to come back to the point of the article - the only low-level language that I'm familiar with that can do it well and reliably is Rust.
In Rust, my absolutely favorite UI framework is egui. It is based on immediate mode rendering (maybe you're familiar with dearimgui), rather than the old, familiar-but-complex retained mode. It's really interesting stuff, recommend studying on it!
Dearimgui has a wonderful quote that summarizes this well:
> "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime." -ryg
We use egui in https://minfx.ai (Neptune/Wandb alternative) and working with it is just a joy. Emilk did such a fantastic job bringing egui about! Of course it has its flaws (most painful is layouting), but other than that it's great!
He makes an interesting point that we are coding programs that run more slowly now than they did 10 years ago. Javascript has only gotten faster over the last decade, computer have faster CPUs and more RAM. The problem is the frameworks and the programs have gotten slower.
What did we gain exactly? Reddit is better at displaying videos and images now. But it's slower despite faster hardware.
I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.
As much as I dislike invasive tracking, I don't think the blame lies with Marketing on this one. In most cases I think you could implement all the awful surveillance you want with extremely minimal overhead, even on the web. Certainly malware developers are at the extreme of invasive + low-overhead!
Certainly there are cases where some manager says "put this script in Google Tag Manager and don't ask any questions", but rarely have I ever seen that be the bottleneck. Programmers actually just write really bad frameworks, and then other programmers use them to make even worse software, for literally no reason other than "maybe this framework design would be cool".
Then go ahead and write vanilla JS and raw HTML! No one is asking you to use any of these bad "state of affairs". If you do build a 100+ page SaaS app without any framework, let me know, I'd love to see how it works.
My clients are. I do web dev for a living and I use these frameworks day in and day out. It’s not even that I dislike the dev ex on most of them and I’ve seen a lot of good code and bad code and I don’t even wanna blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in. I think my comment was more of a dig at the world we live in than anything else.
The frameworks have NOT gotten slower! God I hate Hackernews sometimes... whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework. If anything, the latest React release was almost purely a performance improvement release (and has been for a while) ...most people need to fully understand a tool they use before complaining about it.
Everyone always wants a frontend framework that "just works" - sounds a lot like a free lunch to me! You have to manage the state and updates of your application at some point - the underlying software cant just "guess" what you want. But I'm always like a broken record when these react hate / <insert frontend framework here> hate threads show up - most of the confusion is derived from lack of basic concepts of what problems these frameworks solve in the first place.
> whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework.
If everyone fails to read framework release notes then the problem is frameworks. If you change so quickly and often that almost no developer bothers to keep up to date then you are the problem, not the developer.
> At the time, it took New Reddit almost 200 milliseconds to collapse a single comment. That is 200 milliseconds of pure JavaScript, with hardly any DOM work in sight. If you care about quality software, your jaw should be on the floor. It is a staggering amount of waste for what should have been a few DOM calls. And you feel it as a user: an ugly, intense hitch.
> New Reddit was a React app
Many such cases. React is basically synonymous with horrible lag and extreme bloat to me. Its name is the highest form of irony.
I'm really not sure why JS frameworks in general are so popular (except to facilitate easy corporate turnover), when the browser already gives you a pretty complete toolset that's the easiest to use out of any GUI library in existence. It's not low level by any means.
Granted something like an <include html component> feature is desperately missing from the html spec, but there are lightweight solutions for it.
Someone needs to build Qt’s successor, probably with more beginner-friendly declarative semantics (akin to HCL or Cue) and probably with syntax closest to YAML or Python (based on learning curve, beginner readability etc).
The backend will probably have to be something written in Zig (likely) or Nim (capable, less likely) and will probably have to leverage OpenGL/Metal, WebGL and WASM.
Obviously a massive undertaking, which is why I think the industry has not reached consensus that this is what needs to happen. The less ideal options we have now often gets the job done.
There is Slint (https://slint.dev/), which was a company founded by ex-Qt devs and seem to be trying to make a better alternative to Qt. The core engine is built wiht Rust, but they also provide C++ and JS bindings and also have a QML-like scripting language you can use to design UI quickly. So far I think they've solidified their revenue model by catering to embedded devices, but I haven't seen a solid usecase for desktop apps (yet...)
React gets used because no matter if there is a better way, that's what the company mandated. They want to hire "react devs".
Perhaps AI will help us by allowing us to swap to simpler and better solutions without the same level of pain and without necessarily having to hire experts in that new solution?
Yeah it's a call to action to improve the tooling but it's not the first one I've seen. Tooling really is under focused in many areas.
It would be nice if every language and library had a great working repl and a Jupyter Lab kernel and good mdn-like documentation and w3schools-like tutorials.
My exact complaint. What is the "handmade" community? At first I thought he was talking about woodworking or knitting.
Also the reddit comparison is great, but I wish he would have talked about why the slop is there in the first place.
I'm pretty sure new reddit isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for analytics and datamining.
I bet they use all those backend calls to get really granular session info. When something is super slow, it's not that it's unoptimized, but rather it's optimized for money over user experience.
These bootstraps essentially speedrun software history, and so they tell us a lot about how we got here, and why we write the things we write. But they also create perfect game to weite greenfield alternative bootstraps. The shortest, most readable bootstrap, is proof of the best abstractions, the best way of doing things.
It's a chance to finally put the sort of software stack / tech tree stuff on a more apples-to-apples basis.
The problem is not going away until the deskilling of the software profession is reversed.
I don't see it happening for end user stuff like Reddit. The market seems to want the barely working thing for the most cheap in all consumer product categories.
And hiring someone desperate who has skimmed a React and Node JS tutorial page and is now fullstack something is cheap. Or at least the kind of cheap you can reach by greedily optimizing KPIs.
> a Redux action, which would update the global Redux store, which would cause all Redux-connected components on the page to update, which would cause all their children to update as well. In other words, collapsing one comment triggered an update for nearly every React component on the page. No amount of caching, DOM-diffing, or shouldComponentUpdate can save you from this amount of waste.
yeah this is pretty much 1. an incorrect implementation and/or 2. an incorrect take
and easily solvable with a bit of 'render auditing' / debugging
It's very easy to say the New Reddit devs were just "doing it wrong" and oversubscribing their components to Redux state, for example. (I love me a good `state => state` selector.) But also, this irrelevant-update problem was pervasive across all of New Reddit, across the app I worked on professionally for five years, and across many other applications I've looked at with the React and Redux dev tools. Irrelevant updates happen all the time with this stack.
If everyone who uses it seriously ends up "doing it wrong", I say it's the framework's fault.
I think people overestimate the necessity of 'high level' conveniences or the difficulty of writing C/C++ to the metal.
For example, take Dear.IMGUI which is a c++ UI framework with a kind of data binding, which generates vertex buffers which can be directly uploaded to the GPU and rendered.
It supports most of the fancy layout stuff of CSS afaik (flexbox etc), yet its almost as low level as it gets.
The code is also not that much harder to write than React.
I think it's easier to write than React! (And remember, I did React professionally for many years.)
People assume that surely the pile of high-level languages and frameworks will actually result in a better experience. But Dear Imgui or Clay are genuinely easier to use, easier to iterate in, and faster too. This is why I think it's so unhelpful to focus on the position in the stack: Dear Imgui is a better high level tool than React, despite being "low level" by modern expectations!
You give up on hot reloading when using dear imgui and C++, though. There's nothing comparable to Vite in most ecosystems for building desktop programs, as far as I'm aware.
Tooling is the problem, I've used imgui and it's pretty good. But not nearly as practical for prototyping UI.
> Truckla is an excellent execution of a flawed idea. If you want to build a good pickup truck, you have to start with the frame.
But the "truck" that was "built from the frame" by Tesla was somehow worse. So his argument is frameworks built from the ground up will be ego projects that are big, ugly, shiny, and don't actually work
My whole argument is invalidated because one stupid company designed one really stupid truck? This just in: because pickup trucks have already been invented, all new attempts will result in Cybertrucks.
His argument is that it's not possible to build a good truck from a sedan frame not that all trucks built from a truck frame will be better than Truckla. F'ing up a truck design is pretty much possible
I would say 80% of the software quality issues come from the context and constraints defined by the requirements complexity, design choices, stack selection, infra decisions, org processes and so on.
A lot of this context is tied to org policies and non-technical decisions. AI is not going to redefine this context. It can only increase code production and code level quality. But the source of 80% of the issues remain intact.
> Instead, I imagine a future where we have new “high-level” tools, built from lower in the stack.
This is exactly what I'm trying to build. I'm writing a library on top of Qt that would make it easy to write native code as easy as it is writing React code! I would say it's even easier since we are throwing all the constraints of browsers and web apis out of the way.
I enjoyed reading this article but I think the author overlooked that "low-level" languages aren't just less supported, they're also character-dense. You can accomplish more with less, simply because it's a higher level abstraction. If you choose to abstract through this problem, aren't you creating a high-level language?
As I mentioned in another comment, I find it easier to use Dear Imgui from a "lower-level language" like Odin or Go than to use any web framework with JS. You'd think that because web frameworks are so "high level" they would be better at expressing my intent. But actually the "lower level" tools are easier and faster and universally better. So which one is "high level" now? Which one is doing "more with less"?
And as a bonus if you control both slices of bread it's much easier to change the sandwich filling as well! (Though if the original sandwich-builder wasn't careful you might find some sticky residue left over on your bread… maybe someone should take this metaphor away before I do more damage.)
Really enjoyed reading this. Stuff like this is what inspires me to keep pursuing logos language and theorem prover. Things on the roadmap next include stuff like adding first-class inline ASM support. Adding great SPMD and auto-vectorization pipelines, and exploring making verifiable private computation a language primitive when you make things private. If interested, read about some of the planned upcoming enhancements here. :) https://github.com/Brahmastra-Labs/logicaffeine/issues
I really agree with the point about React and Redux. It is crazy that collapsing a comment can take 200ms just because of the framework overhead. We have way too much power in our computers to be okay with this kind of lag in basic UI tasks.
While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.
jquery was an unoptimised mess? it's like 30k minimised and just bridged a bunch of functionality that browsers lacked as well as providing a generic api that let you (often) ignore per-browser implementation and testing of your code
there's no reason to blame it for the types of websites being made either, it doesn't really provide enough functionality to influence the type of site you use it on
Since when did we start using file size as a measure of efficiency or optimization?
Off the top of my head: $() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById, both of which predate jquery by years. Every $('.my-class') created wrapped objects with overhead. Something like $('#myButton').click(fn) involved creating an intermediate object just to attach an event listener you could’ve done natively. The deeper the method chaining got the worse the performance penalty, and devs rarely cached the selectors even in tight loops. It was the PHP of Javascript, which is really saying something.
By the early-2010s most of the library was dead weight since everyone started shipping polyfills but people kept plopping down jquery-calendar like it was 2006.
(I say this as someone who has fond memories of using Jquery in 2007 to win a national competition in high school, after which I became a regular contributor for years)
Something interesting happened, this is the first time I read him and just after I finish the article and I get into YouTube YouTube recommends me a video from the author with the same title
The social justice company that laid off many engineers, has questionable finances, and been subsidized by google enough (google needs them to exist) that they became dysfunctional? You're not helping your case WASM never fulfilled it's promises either
> Their view of the world was too high-level. If all you know is React, you have no choices—you can only use React, or meta-frameworks on top of React. But the lower level you can go, the more the tree opens up to you.
This is quite honestly the stupidest thing I ever read, and I read a lot of uncle bob
This is a good reminder that abstractions are supposed to help us solve problems rather than just hide the details. I feel like I spend too much time fighting against tools that try to prevent me from seeing how things really work.
OS is to blame. There should be a way for the OS to tell to the app "offload your state" like phones do. Paging is supposed to achieve this but does not.
* These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op.... The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. there are hundreds of registers on modern CPUs, but you can't access them directly and just have to hope the hardware does a good job of register allocation.)
* Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine. E.g. it doesn't have distinct integer and floating point types. Rust represents the machine and is fast, but is not as ergonomic as it could be. OxCaml is inspiring me lately as it's an ergonomic high-level language that also represents the machine. (Scala 3 is also getting there with capture checking, but that is still experimental.) If we want more performance we have to give a way to efficiently write code that can be turned into efficient code.
Sure x86 is an absolute mess, but I don't think it's a primary bottleneck. High end x86 cpus still beat high end ARM cpus by a significant margin on raw performance. Even supposing x86/ARM are bottlenecks... yeah a bottleneck at double digit billion ops per second.
> Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine.
C# and Go are already really fast (https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages) languages for the masses and at this point you can compile most things to WASM to get them run in the browser.
You think collapsing a comment quickly would be difficult in x86_64 assembly?
I would expect 1000's of frames of opens/closes per second. Probably an order or two more. The LCD's data bandwidth and our retina's sensitivity would be decisive bottlenecks at far slower speeds.
TLDR: CPUs, that are not getting slower, are not the reason newer software implementations often get slower.
The Reddit example is about two different design choices. The DOM is a tree of state that needs to stay in sync with your app state. So how to make that happen without turning your code into a mess. The old Reddit had to first construct the DOM and then for every state change, determine what DOM nodes need to change, find them and update them. Knowing what needs to change gets ugly in a lot of apps. The other alternative is to realize that constructing a DOM from any arbitrary state is pretty much the same as constructing it from initial state. But now you don’t have to track what DOM nodes must change on every state change. This is a massive reduction in code complexity. I will grant that there is something similar to the “expression” problem. Every time there is a new state element introduced it may affect the creation of every node in the DOM. As opposed to every time a UI element is added it may affect every state transition. The first Reddit can be fast, but you have to manage all the updates. The second is slow, but easier to develop. I’m not sure going any lower solves any of that. The React version can be made more efficient through intelligent compilers that are at better at detecting change and doing updates. The React model allows for tooling optimizations. These might well beat hand written changes. The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
The thing is that you can still have high-level abstractions without them needing to be as slow as React. React does a slow thing by default (rerendering every child component whenever state changes, so every component in the UI if top-level state is changing), and then requires careful optimisation to correct for that decision.
But you can also just... update the right DOM element directly, whenever a state changes that would cause it to be updated. You don't need to create mountains of VDOM only to throw it away, nor do you need to rerender entire components.
This is how SolidJS, Svelte, and more recently Vue work. They use signals and effects to track which state is used in which parts of the application, and update only the necessary parts of the DOM. The result is significantly more performant, especially for deeply nested component trees, because you're just doing way less work in total. But the kicker is that these frameworks aren't any less high-level or easy-to-use. SolidJS looks basically the same as React, just with some of the intermediate computations wrapped in functions. Vue is one of the most popular frameworks around. And yet all three perform at a similar level to if you'd built the application using optimal vanilla JavaScript.
We measure computer performance in the billions and trillions of ops per second. I'm sorry but if it an app takes 200ms to hide some comments, the app or the tech stack it's on is badly made.
> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
Hugely multiplayer games consistently update at under 16ms.
> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
What part of hiding a comment requires a HTTP round trip? In 200ms you could do 20 round trips.
I'm fairly confident that the new reddit React implementation can be improved in performance by a factor of 3x to 10x. I would be interested to hear others who have good reason to explain why not. I can certainly imagine React-like systems that are capable of statically determining DOM influence sufficient to make comment-collapsing negligible.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone with just a little bit of experience that the reddit devs barely know what they are doing. This applies to their frontend as well as backend. For some reason, reddit is also the only major social network where downtime is expected. Reddit throwing 500 errors under load happens literally every week.
Reddit also puts the "eventually" in "eventually consistent". Not in the sense of consistency being driven by events, but in the colloquial sense of "someday". The new message indicator will go away ... eventually. Your comment will show up ... eventually.
I think the point about tooling being the problem deserves more emphasis. I'm a firm believer that the right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do. Currently, the easiest place to innovate is at the top of the stack, using web technologies and languages like JavaScript.
You can see this with languages like Rust and Go—they're some of the first low-level programming languages with actually good tooling, and, as a result, they're becoming very popular. I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.
If you want your language/library/framework/layer in the stack to become popular, make the tooling good and make it easy for folks to get their questions answered. Everything else will follow.
Most of the time it's genuinely much easier to use Rust or Go than to use Python or Node because the tools are just so much better. This is why I don't like judging "high level" or "low level" by some perceived position in the stack. All I care about is how well it lets me express my intent as a programmer.
> and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.
Maybe it's just me, but that right there is the stuff of nightmares. What library, and written by who, is it going to pull in.
But what's changed is decisively not "Now I don't know which libraries will be used or who made this library" but instead "The library I wanted was easier to get because the tools work".
Agreed. I don’t think easy package management is the problem, though. Rather, it’s just triggered a Cambrian explosion of packages, and now security needs to catch up.
> a gigantic manual that lists every property of the system in excruciating detail, which is totally worthless for learning and barely usable as reference.
It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
> low-level tools are terrible too
It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.
> We could have editor plugins and language servers to help beginners along
We already have all that.
> It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
I guess it's like a dictionary: it's only useful if you know the word you want to look up, rather than reading through every definition until you find the function/library/ability that you want. I do agree though, when I need to look something up, I do want it in great detail - it just isn't a very good learning resource.
> It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.
Can you give some examples? The author made a compelling argument on how easy it is to use the browser debugger. I would be of great interest for something similar.
> We already have all that.
I've only seen these for simple python applications or web development, never in any 'low level' space. And certainly not for doing anything interesting in the low level space (something that is not just a C++ language tutorial).
Language servers with LSP for Rust and C++ are available and, I believe, widely used. At least I use them.
I think the original article wasn't just proposing the existence of language servers, but specifically that they (that do exist) should be used to help beginners to make the process of low level software development approach the level of ease as web development with it's tooling.
I'm not quite sure what they would look like in practise.
As a reference, yes, when you already have the context. But you need a guide. In fact, that's also the function of a doctoral advisor, to help you navigate a subject matter.
To be clear, I also appreciate good reference. But reference is bad to learn from, and frankly a big PDF is not even a very usable reference resource when compared to, say, MDN.
As for lack of familiarity, I am certainly not some grizzled 80s Unix veteran, but if you're comparing the Chrome or Firefox dev tools vs. `perf`, it's no contest. Browser dev tools help devs build an accurate mental model of what their software is doing. It is extraordinarily rare to find command-line tools or other low-level tools that are well designed enough to do this. (Maybe Superluminal now? Tracy?)
> It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
This is one of those "there are N types of people in the world". I'm with you, a detailed reference is the ideal scenario, but there seem to be many people who don't find that useful given their knowledge acquisition style.
Sure. But they explicitly claimed that a detailed reference is not useful as a reference.
Not any reference, though, but a specific style of one: A reference mostly written as a box-ticking exercise, written more for the writer than the reader. I like manpages, but the microcontroller manuals rarely reach those lofty heights.
I think the real conclusion is: someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck. (Yeah Qt exists, but it really sucks...) Until then, everyone will default to just using the browser for a desktop app, and the beatings will continue.
Because of this, I'm really looking forward for PanGUI to step up (https://www.pangui.io/), their UI framework is very promising and I would start using it in a heartbeat when the beta actually releases!
> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck
This is exactly what we're trying to do with Slint (https://github.com/slint-ui/slint ). It’s a native, cross-platform UI framework for desktop and embedded (Rust/C++/Python/JS), with no browser runtime
Why do you think Qt sucks? Other than the C++ focus, and basically the framework's decision to make you use everything they give you, which is controversial.
But apps made with Qt as an end product don't think suck. Qt is a fully featured and modern and high quality framework.
I agree. Modern Qt is great - you get the performance of C++ and the ease of use (simpler than React!) of creating UIs in QML. I've built my note-taking app with a from scratch block editor[1] (like Notions's) with it. Now working on a mobile version[2]. Also working on a LLM client[3]. And working on a library that will simplify and help others build such apps easily - which is my solution to the original article author's problem.
[1] https://get-notes.com/
[2] https://rubymamistvalove.com/notes-mobile-swipe-stack-view.M...
[3] https://www.get-vox.com/
So, are you using QT for the mobile version as well?
Yes! I'm not using Qt's built-in components like StackView, but reimplementing them from scratch to better support swipe gestures, etc so they feel native-like.
Apps made with qt are mostly good but the engine sucks hard indeed. The programming is difficult, let's say compared to GTK, the SDK interface change totally every couple of years forcing apps to rewrite everything from scratch. Probably related to that, the documentation is splitted in an hundred places, often undecipherable between what is obsolete or for current version. Most parts of the framework are not really documented anyway, there is just automatically generated reference guide from the code that is missing most part that is needed. Like you have an option name, now what does it mean? What this option to be used for? It's hard to extend simply to bypass default behavior of the SDK that could be limiting. Let me not speak of the whole qml craziness and the qtuieditor... And the worse of it is that the license is (or was because I don't know recent evolution) totally shitty. Like free to use in that case and that case, and commercial in that case and that case. No one serious would like to build something on a private garden like that.
I have yet to find a cross-platform UI framework that really feels native on Gnome. The reality is that there is no shortcut for native UI on all platforms, you have to use the “official” framework (e.g. GTK for Gnome). In my opinion the only softwares that should use a custom framework are professional grade apps where custom workflows can’t fit the native UI (e.g. Blender). Despite all the noise about native cross-platform frameworks, it’s absolutely not fooling anyone, we can spot this immediately on any platform.
> I have yet to find a cross-platform UI framework that really feels native on Gnome. The reality is that there is no shortcut for native UI on all platforms, you have to use the “official” framework (e.g. GTK for Gnome).
The alternative to cross platform frameworks that do not feel completely native on all platforms is to use browsers for desktop apps which do not feel native on any platform. They do not even have similar UIs to each other.
We would be better off using imperfect cross platform frameworks rather than sticking everything in the browser.
I think part of the reason this happens is that users accept it because they are used to web apps so do not expect consistency.
This correct. What's actually needed is a modernized wxWidgets. The goal of the GUI framework should be to find an architecture that is maximally compatible with the native Windows, GTK, QT, Mac OS UI frameworks/libraries plus a simple way to accommodate minor platform differences.
IDK, it seems like old reddit did just fine without even trying that hard. The DOM and surrounding JS API is already a high level GUI framework, and the post illustrates that it's perfectly capable of doing useful interactions >60fps. I personally love working with native code, but the modern browser is capable of producing fast interfaces that saturate human senses without it. If you write JS like a C programmer would, it will usually be quite fast, even if it's not optimal. If you write native apps in C++ like a modern JS programmer - frameworks and deps with abandon - it will be a stuttery mess.
When the DOM is not enough, there's already WebGL and WASM. A vanishingly small sliver of use cases can't saturate human senses with these tools, and the slowest, jankiest websites tend to be the least deserving of them (ie: why is jira slow? It's literally a text box with a handful of buttons on the side!).
> (ie: why is jira slow? It's literally a text box with a handful of buttons on the side!).
Despite me agreeing with your overall point, this is such a ridiculous comment to make. You and I both know Jira is much much more than that. Reductive things like this just turn off people who would otherwise listen to you.
Has somebody written an analysis why Qt really sucks? It would be great to have a spec for a GOOD cross-platform (desktop) UI framework. It might be also possible to create a reference implementation of that spec on top of Qt.
> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck
That's the browser, native ui development failed because it didn't want to lose money on cross platform compatibility, security, or user onboarding experience.
The web is fast enough for 99% of UIs, the story is not about using web, the story is about using the web poorly. old.reddit is not qt.
There's Lazarus / FPC. Fast, small. Extremely quick compiler. The language has its warts but very readable and relatively simple yet powerful. Uncool and treated like a relic though
Never heard of PanGUI - glad to see its C#, will have to try it out.
They're making the initial version with C#, but they have plans to make the library language-agnostic. Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.
>Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.
It sounds like a clever idea.
>someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck.
You can't. At best it will shine on one platform and be mediocre on all the others. At worst it will be mediocre everywhere. There are too many differences between Windows, macOS and the various Linux desktops. That's before you start thinking about mobile.
I’m also looking forward to gpui (https://www.gpui.rs/) from the Zed folks.
PanGUI seems to be interesting. However being mobile ready would matter a lot for adoption and I couldn't see anything on their sites regarding mobile platforms.
I don’t think it makes sense to use the same framework for desktop and mobile apps. That gives you either terrible desktop apps or terrible mobile apps. Put the business/backend logic into a shared library, but build separate mobile and desktop apps on top of it.
What about Flutter?
Not bad for mobile apps, but still sucks a lot for desktop support.
Also, really wished they've opted for a more general language like C# rather than Dart - but that's inevitable since Google needed to make use of their Dart language after they've failed to standardize it on the Web (and I think they don't want to use a language developed by Microsoft of all companies)
They've picked Dart because it was the only language that could have small aot binaries, hot reload capable runtime without compromise and most importantly because they could influence development of the language.
C# is one of the worst choices they could make at the time.
Yeah good point. Although C# nowadays has good AOT support, that wasn't the case in the early days of Flutter (Google could have collaborated with Microsoft to develop this, but why would they?...)
I don't think so, I think that some teams at Google were trying hard to push Dart that no one wanted. And so Flutter was about to create a framework that was supposed to be the main and only one for Android app and co in the future (at that time) to force us on switching to Dart.
No.
Why would C# be the worst choice? Do you gave any real arguments or is it just your biased opinion.
Sorry, made a typo with 'gave' -> 'have'. But the point stays , why would C# be (one of) the worst choices here (when C# has small AOT binaries, hot reload etc)?
> when C# has small AOT binaries, hot reload etc
In 2015?
Nowadays C# has good AOT support, but it wasn't when Flutter was in its infancy.
Anything that forces a specific language is a no-no.
There was WxWidgets.
The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all.
I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development, but so far they've focused most of their efforts on mobile and I don't think this will change in the future.
As 1 datapoint to support this, see Audacity moving from WxWidgets to Qt for 4.0.
Absolutely, they need Qt in order to design and theme a UI that actually doesn't look terrible (They already had good experience in porting Musescore from vanilla C++ Qt5 to QML widgets, so I think they'll use a similar system for Audacity)
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development
I really don't think there is any broad future for Flutter. Requiring adoption of a new programming language is making an already an uphill battle even steeper, and the way they insist on rendering websites in a single giant canvas is... ugh
> The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all.
That's not consensus. I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that. It forces one to build the entire app in C++, and that's because, although open-source, its design revolves around the needs of the paying customers of Trolltech: companies doing multi-platform paid apps.
I want a graphical toolkit: a simple library that can be started in a thread and allows me to use whatever language runtime I want to implement the rest of the application.
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development
Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.
> I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that.
Yes, that is the consensus of why Qt sucks - it's a massive framework that tries to do everything at the same time with a massive toolset of in-house libraries. This is inherently tied to the revenue model of the Qt Company - sell custom modules that work well with the Qt ecosystem at a high enterprise-level price. I also wish to just use the "good" parts of Qt but I can't, since it already has a massive QtCore as its dependency.
However, there is still no cross-platform framework except for Qt that can actually do the most important things that a desktop framework actually needs: an actual widget editor, styling and theming, internationalization, interop with native graphics APIs (though I have gripes with their RHI system), etc. That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha.
> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development >> Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.
Yeah, but at that time I thought this was at least better than wrangling with Qt / QML. You can write the core application logic ("engine" code) in C++ and bind it with Dart. There are already some companies I've seen gone a similar route with C# / WPF.
As far as I can tell, PanGUI is a drawing library not a graphical toolkit. Its primitives are geometrical, not widgets. Its showcase is an audio app, which is as far away as possible from a boring productivity application that I'd like to do.
In my university days I was very much into GUIs, and I've written apps with wxWidgets, plain Gtk 1 and 2, GNOME 2, Qt, Tk, GNUstep and even some fairly obscure ones like E17 and FTLK. For my tastes, the nicest ones were probably GNOME2, Elementary and wxWidgets. Especially GNOME2, which had a simple builder that let me create the basic shell of an app, with some horizontal and vertical layout boxes that I could later "hydrate" with the application logic.
>That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha
They say it's in beta and it seems anyone can sign up for the beta.
Ah good point. Though I've already signed up for it and didn't get the invite yet... so this seems more like a closed beta.
> Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime that I don't like is dead in the water.
Ftfy.
No. Any forced runtime is bad because overall it will have few users. The ideal is a C library with the API described in some IDL that allows mechanical generation of bindings for all language runtimes.
I really like the sentiment here, and Handmade Network has such a cool vibe, but I can't help but think that he/they would have a bigger impact by focusing more on illustrating to people how this mindset leads to value and less on teaching and learning the skills.
>Building it yourself might sound crazy, but it’s been done successfully many times before—for example, Figma famously built their app from scratch in WASM and WebGL, and it runs shockingly well on very large projects.
Yes, let's hear more about this. "Collapsing Reddit comments could have been like 180ms faster" isn't very convincing to smart, ambitious people deciding what they want to be about. Find more examples like Figma and get people to believe that there's still lots of room for up and comers to make a name for themselves by standing on their performance, and they'll take care of the learning and building themselves.
> "Collapsing Reddit comments could have been like 180ms faster" isn't very convincing to smart, ambitious people deciding what they want to be about
It's fairly compelling to an audience who spends a lot of time browsing reddit, however
Even 20ms is crazy, video games rendering and simulation entire worlds at 60Fps do so in 16.6 ms
> If you have heard of the Handmade community, you likely think...
I think that "the Handmade community" are people who mistook Casey for a messiah, in a sort of "Life of Brian" scenario.
The best part of "Handmade" is when somebody who'd otherwise doubt their ability makes a video game. The resulting games are usually at least interesting, and video games are art so, interesting is enough. If Steam had a dozen interesting crap games for every asset-flip cash-grab piece of junk it would have a very different reputation.
The worst part of "Handmade" is the mob of people who can't and won't make useful software but feel Casey (and much worse Jon Blow and Ginger Bill) has given them permission to criticise anybody who does because the software didn't meet their sky-high expectations.
I think as typical niche Internet "communities" do, the most vocal will naturally be snobby elitists who deride at anything that doesn't fit in their narrow worldview, and that mob will naturally represent the "community". (I also think Jon Blow has his part in enabling that, but oh well.)
But I'm still impressed what Casey was able to organize during the past few years, it's clear that what he's published as educational material (Handmade Hero, Computer: Enhance) has invigorated interest in low-level programming. Even though there might not be immediate results, I think this will matter later on when the people who grew up with these materials will now build new infrastructure for the post-Web era.
Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.
E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....
Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....
> Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem.
Not quite. The path to high level always involves abstractions that fit the problem. There is still room for a decision to replace high-level with low-level in some very specific bits of a hot path, but that decision also takes into consideration the tradeoffs of foregoing straight-forward high-level solutions with low-level versions that are harder to maintain. The sales pitch to push code that is harder to maintain requires a case that goes way beyond performance arguments.
I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality to your goal in a way that is both economical and is very good at reaching the stated goal.
Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.
In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.
Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?
It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).
I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.
> I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality
I'd phrase it differently: Civil engineering is fundamentally about understanding trade-offs within hard constraints. You have materials of known strength, known wear, and known properties (compression vs shear). It's boring by default because the physics don't budge.
A lot of software engineering, web and SaaS development in particular, hasn't had to confront comparable resource limitations. For decades we've had (for practical purposes) an infinitely fast calculator, practically infinite supply of active working data and and infinite amount of them to chain together. So, without constraints people have just run wild.
But here's where it gets interesting from my perspective: when you point out the resulting bloat (200ms to open a Reddit comment), many developers will defend it not as a technical failure but as correct business prioritisation. "User hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive" or "users will upgrade their devices anyway"—essentially externalising the performance cost onto users rather than absorbing it as an engineering constraint.
That's the fundamental difference. An automotive engineer can't build a 20-tonne car and tell customers to buy stronger roads. But we absolutely can ship bloated software and tell users to buy faster computers, more bandwidth, better phones. And for a long time, we've got away with it.
The question is whether that's still sustainable, or whether we're approaching the limits of what users will tolerate.
I think the main issue is lack of competition. If company A makes a 10% worse car that costs 10% more than company B, they very quickly go out of business.
There is no 'Reddit 2' substitute product (or indeed for lots of software), and network effects tend to dominate, so your benchmark is 'is it bad enough so people would rather use nothing than your product', which is a very low bar to clear.
Spot on. And it's worse than that: you're not choosing between a 10% slower product and a faster alternative, you're choosing between a slow product and losing access to everyone still using it. That's not a market choice, it's a hostage situation.
We can see this works in reverse: developer tools, CLIs, and local apps where network effects don't apply (ripgrep over grep, esbuild over webpack) performance actually matters and gets rewarded. Developers switch because they can switch without losing anything. But Instagram users can't switch to a lighter alternative without abandoning their social graph.
This is why the "developer time is expensive, user hardware is cheap" argument only works in the absence of competition. In genuinely competitive markets, efficient code becomes a competitive advantage worth investing in. The fact that it's "not worth optimising" is itself evidence of market power, not sound economics.
Your automotive analogy actually understates it: imagine if switching to a better car meant your old car's passengers couldn't ride with you anymore, and that's closer to what we're dealing with.
Network effect is basically the same thing as urban agglomeration in real life. The value of a city is from all the people aggregating together to provide goods and services and people are worrying about the housing crisis.
So what is the correct solution to all of this? I would be tempted to reach for a land value tax except this doesn't really apply to cyberspace. The only "land" is built by the platform themselves, but at the same time the platform isn't solely responsible for all the value generated on the platform. So, maybe we should tax network effects.
A major difference is what costs money.
A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.
The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.
Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.
In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.
When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.
I think the argument you present here makes an MBA kind of sense, but with the benefits of hindsigh, we know exactly what sort of costs this encurred.
People hated the redesign, and stuck with the old reddit UI as much as possible. The company lost a ton of benevolence. Alternative frontends sprung up overnight, which used the API.
Management was probably faced with the dilemma that if new features were only developed for the new UI, a significant chunk of the userbase would not get to use them.
This was probably one of the major factors on the decision from Reddit to kill the API, which created a ton of negative sentiment, some of it probably lingers to this day.
I'm sure a lot of people were either driven away entirely or significantly reduced the amount and quality they posted. While numerically small in number, we know that most of the quality content comes from very few people.
Reddit might have more users now than any time before in history, but I'd argue user satisfaction and engagement is lower than the days before, and the quality of the content and discussion to be had means most people don't bother.
At the big tech firms, there are engineers looking for software fixes that make tiny efficiency improvements that can save lots of money at scale.
Meanwhile, Google and Apple look for whatever ways they can to improve battery life on their phones.
But for many other developers, this isn’t going to save money or increase sales, so the incentives are more indirect.
> At the big tech firms, there are engineers looking for software fixes that make tiny efficiency improvements that can save lots of money at scale. Meanwhile, Google and Apple look for whatever ways they can to improve battery life on their phones.
While this is true for parts of these companies, I think the user experience with their products makes it clear that the performance focus only goes in a very select few areas.
Perhaps my favorite Google example is the absolute dogshit performance of Google Home devices. By any objective metric, these are fairly capable computers (quad-core arm64 processors) running a tiny number of apps and yet their UI is still incredibly sluggish. Better yet, these are basically the only real-world devices that run Fuchsia - they should be shining examples of the performance of a brand new OS and yet they are anything but.
Yeah, it's a big company and dedication to performance is uneven.
I know this article is largely about too many js frameworks and also a call to making better tooling for low-level programming.
But it is also largely about the fact that most people making those js frameworks are not low-level programmers.
Folks really ought to check out Datastar. It's a newish js framework that is extremely innovative despite leaning as much as possible on browser apis. It's htmx + alpine + much more, yet smaller, faster and simpler.
Because it is built by a low-level programmer who is making the framework as a yak shaving side-quest. There's no dependencies - he built his own (world's fastest) signals and DOM morphing algorithms. V1 should be released soonish and they expect to never need a v2 - it'll just work forever (and probably become slimmer as browser capabilities grow).
And when he needs a break from that, he develops innovative approaches to CSS, serialization protocols, and databases.
https://data-star.dev
The discord is a fantastic place as well, of like-minded people.
Just my point of view but I like the vibe of the htmx creator but think that htmx sucks to use it more than for a demo case.
If the guy was not cool and posting fun memes, no one would even look at that.
You go backward in term of performance by forcing a constant stream of heavy content between the app and the backend, state is hard to manage, The backend would have again to take charge of the CPU intensive part of the app for users. The framework is limiting by trying to be very simple, fitting tags and hiding the complexity to the dev (in an "automagic" way). But that is the worse as, as soon you want to deviate from the main documented highway case, it will become nightmarish.
Are you replying to the right comment? Mine was about datastar, not htmx.
Though, you seem to be arguing against hypermedia in general - a stance which is just plain wrong in most cases. Htmx's essays and book do a good job of addressing why.
I'm switching to Data Star because it feels like it exists in the golden zone between HTMX and React.
I'd say it's not in between so much as subsumes both, and then does even more. While being smaller, faster and simpler. Htmx v4 (in beta) will close the gap by becoming a heavier datastar-lite with idiomorph and sse built in, but no signals, SDKs, and just all-round polish and back-to-front integration.
he is out of line, but he is right
I feel like I'm somewhere on that Venn diagram O:-)
The specific examples in the article are about UI.
I agree that UI ecosystem is a big and slow mess, because there is actually a LOT of complexity in UIs. I would even argue that there is often more complexity to be found in UIs than in backends (unless you are working on distributed systems, or writing your own database). On backend, you usually just need paralellism (95% of jobs is just parallel for, map-reduce kind of thing).
But in UI, you need concurrency! You have tons of mutable STATE flying around that you need to synchronize - within UI, across threads or with the backend. This is /hard/ - and to come back to the point of the article - the only low-level language that I'm familiar with that can do it well and reliably is Rust.
In Rust, my absolutely favorite UI framework is egui. It is based on immediate mode rendering (maybe you're familiar with dearimgui), rather than the old, familiar-but-complex retained mode. It's really interesting stuff, recommend studying on it! Dearimgui has a wonderful quote that summarizes this well:
> "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime." -ryg
We use egui in https://minfx.ai (Neptune/Wandb alternative) and working with it is just a joy. Emilk did such a fantastic job bringing egui about! Of course it has its flaws (most painful is layouting), but other than that it's great!
He makes an interesting point that we are coding programs that run more slowly now than they did 10 years ago. Javascript has only gotten faster over the last decade, computer have faster CPUs and more RAM. The problem is the frameworks and the programs have gotten slower.
What did we gain exactly? Reddit is better at displaying videos and images now. But it's slower despite faster hardware.
I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.
As much as I dislike invasive tracking, I don't think the blame lies with Marketing on this one. In most cases I think you could implement all the awful surveillance you want with extremely minimal overhead, even on the web. Certainly malware developers are at the extreme of invasive + low-overhead!
Certainly there are cases where some manager says "put this script in Google Tag Manager and don't ask any questions", but rarely have I ever seen that be the bottleneck. Programmers actually just write really bad frameworks, and then other programmers use them to make even worse software, for literally no reason other than "maybe this framework design would be cool".
Then go ahead and write vanilla JS and raw HTML! No one is asking you to use any of these bad "state of affairs". If you do build a 100+ page SaaS app without any framework, let me know, I'd love to see how it works.
My clients are. I do web dev for a living and I use these frameworks day in and day out. It’s not even that I dislike the dev ex on most of them and I’ve seen a lot of good code and bad code and I don’t even wanna blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in. I think my comment was more of a dig at the world we live in than anything else.
The frameworks have NOT gotten slower! God I hate Hackernews sometimes... whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework. If anything, the latest React release was almost purely a performance improvement release (and has been for a while) ...most people need to fully understand a tool they use before complaining about it.
Everyone always wants a frontend framework that "just works" - sounds a lot like a free lunch to me! You have to manage the state and updates of your application at some point - the underlying software cant just "guess" what you want. But I'm always like a broken record when these react hate / <insert frontend framework here> hate threads show up - most of the confusion is derived from lack of basic concepts of what problems these frameworks solve in the first place.
> whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework.
If everyone fails to read framework release notes then the problem is frameworks. If you change so quickly and often that almost no developer bothers to keep up to date then you are the problem, not the developer.
> At the time, it took New Reddit almost 200 milliseconds to collapse a single comment. That is 200 milliseconds of pure JavaScript, with hardly any DOM work in sight. If you care about quality software, your jaw should be on the floor. It is a staggering amount of waste for what should have been a few DOM calls. And you feel it as a user: an ugly, intense hitch.
> New Reddit was a React app
Many such cases. React is basically synonymous with horrible lag and extreme bloat to me. Its name is the highest form of irony.
I'm really not sure why JS frameworks in general are so popular (except to facilitate easy corporate turnover), when the browser already gives you a pretty complete toolset that's the easiest to use out of any GUI library in existence. It's not low level by any means.
Granted something like an <include html component> feature is desperately missing from the html spec, but there are lightweight solutions for it.
So from what I understand…
Someone needs to build Qt’s successor, probably with more beginner-friendly declarative semantics (akin to HCL or Cue) and probably with syntax closest to YAML or Python (based on learning curve, beginner readability etc).
The backend will probably have to be something written in Zig (likely) or Nim (capable, less likely) and will probably have to leverage OpenGL/Metal, WebGL and WASM.
Obviously a massive undertaking, which is why I think the industry has not reached consensus that this is what needs to happen. The less ideal options we have now often gets the job done.
There is Slint (https://slint.dev/), which was a company founded by ex-Qt devs and seem to be trying to make a better alternative to Qt. The core engine is built wiht Rust, but they also provide C++ and JS bindings and also have a QML-like scripting language you can use to design UI quickly. So far I think they've solidified their revenue model by catering to embedded devices, but I haven't seen a solid usecase for desktop apps (yet...)
There are some desktop apps made with Slint. For example:
- WesAudio has a VST plugin for audio applications: https://slint.dev/success/wesaudio-daw
- LibrePCB 2.0, is migrating their code from Qt to Slint and should soon be released. https://librepcb.org/blog/2025-09-12_preview_of_next_gen_ui/
- krokiet: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/blob/master/krokiet/README...
QML isn’t that different anyway from what you describe
React gets used because no matter if there is a better way, that's what the company mandated. They want to hire "react devs".
Perhaps AI will help us by allowing us to swap to simpler and better solutions without the same level of pain and without necessarily having to hire experts in that new solution?
Moving to preact, at the very least, is not a huge endeavor.
While I am totally on board with the idea... the article doesn't really say what to actually do to help?
"we at Handmade community" - and no link to that community anywhere
blog itself? 2 posts a year, and 2025 posts aren't even on the blog itself (just redirects)
Yes, tooling and toolmaking should be promoted - but promotion itself should also be accessible somehow?
Yeah it's a call to action to improve the tooling but it's not the first one I've seen. Tooling really is under focused in many areas.
It would be nice if every language and library had a great working repl and a Jupyter Lab kernel and good mdn-like documentation and w3schools-like tutorials.
This is probably the community he was talking about:
https://handmade.network/
Here's the manifesto: https://handmade.network/manifesto
My exact complaint. What is the "handmade" community? At first I thought he was talking about woodworking or knitting.
Also the reddit comparison is great, but I wish he would have talked about why the slop is there in the first place.
I'm pretty sure new reddit isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for analytics and datamining.
I bet they use all those backend calls to get really granular session info. When something is super slow, it's not that it's unoptimized, but rather it's optimized for money over user experience.
This is why I think the maximally from source bootstrap that Guix did, and that Nixpkgs is about to do too https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/479322 is so important.
These bootstraps essentially speedrun software history, and so they tell us a lot about how we got here, and why we write the things we write. But they also create perfect game to weite greenfield alternative bootstraps. The shortest, most readable bootstrap, is proof of the best abstractions, the best way of doing things.
It's a chance to finally put the sort of software stack / tech tree stuff on a more apples-to-apples basis.
Side note, but this article reads like a Wes Anderson film, if that makes any sense.
I haven't seen his whole filmography, but I can see Asteroid City in this, yeah.
The problem is not going away until the deskilling of the software profession is reversed.
I don't see it happening for end user stuff like Reddit. The market seems to want the barely working thing for the most cheap in all consumer product categories.
And hiring someone desperate who has skimmed a React and Node JS tutorial page and is now fullstack something is cheap. Or at least the kind of cheap you can reach by greedily optimizing KPIs.
> a Redux action, which would update the global Redux store, which would cause all Redux-connected components on the page to update, which would cause all their children to update as well. In other words, collapsing one comment triggered an update for nearly every React component on the page. No amount of caching, DOM-diffing, or shouldComponentUpdate can save you from this amount of waste.
yeah this is pretty much 1. an incorrect implementation and/or 2. an incorrect take
and easily solvable with a bit of 'render auditing' / debugging
It's very easy to say the New Reddit devs were just "doing it wrong" and oversubscribing their components to Redux state, for example. (I love me a good `state => state` selector.) But also, this irrelevant-update problem was pervasive across all of New Reddit, across the app I worked on professionally for five years, and across many other applications I've looked at with the React and Redux dev tools. Irrelevant updates happen all the time with this stack.
If everyone who uses it seriously ends up "doing it wrong", I say it's the framework's fault.
I think people overestimate the necessity of 'high level' conveniences or the difficulty of writing C/C++ to the metal.
For example, take Dear.IMGUI which is a c++ UI framework with a kind of data binding, which generates vertex buffers which can be directly uploaded to the GPU and rendered.
It supports most of the fancy layout stuff of CSS afaik (flexbox etc), yet its almost as low level as it gets.
The code is also not that much harder to write than React.
I think it's easier to write than React! (And remember, I did React professionally for many years.)
People assume that surely the pile of high-level languages and frameworks will actually result in a better experience. But Dear Imgui or Clay are genuinely easier to use, easier to iterate in, and faster too. This is why I think it's so unhelpful to focus on the position in the stack: Dear Imgui is a better high level tool than React, despite being "low level" by modern expectations!
You give up on hot reloading when using dear imgui and C++, though. There's nothing comparable to Vite in most ecosystems for building desktop programs, as far as I'm aware.
Tooling is the problem, I've used imgui and it's pretty good. But not nearly as practical for prototyping UI.
> Truckla is an excellent execution of a flawed idea. If you want to build a good pickup truck, you have to start with the frame.
But the "truck" that was "built from the frame" by Tesla was somehow worse. So his argument is frameworks built from the ground up will be ego projects that are big, ugly, shiny, and don't actually work
My whole argument is invalidated because one stupid company designed one really stupid truck? This just in: because pickup trucks have already been invented, all new attempts will result in Cybertrucks.
His argument is that it's not possible to build a good truck from a sedan frame not that all trucks built from a truck frame will be better than Truckla. F'ing up a truck design is pretty much possible
I would say 80% of the software quality issues come from the context and constraints defined by the requirements complexity, design choices, stack selection, infra decisions, org processes and so on. A lot of this context is tied to org policies and non-technical decisions. AI is not going to redefine this context. It can only increase code production and code level quality. But the source of 80% of the issues remain intact.
> Instead, I imagine a future where we have new “high-level” tools, built from lower in the stack.
This is exactly what I'm trying to build. I'm writing a library on top of Qt that would make it easy to write native code as easy as it is writing React code! I would say it's even easier since we are throwing all the constraints of browsers and web apis out of the way.
I enjoyed reading this article but I think the author overlooked that "low-level" languages aren't just less supported, they're also character-dense. You can accomplish more with less, simply because it's a higher level abstraction. If you choose to abstract through this problem, aren't you creating a high-level language?
As I mentioned in another comment, I find it easier to use Dear Imgui from a "lower-level language" like Odin or Go than to use any web framework with JS. You'd think that because web frameworks are so "high level" they would be better at expressing my intent. But actually the "lower level" tools are easier and faster and universally better. So which one is "high level" now? Which one is doing "more with less"?
If you read to the end, the author does advocate for creating more high-level foundations.
When you can build down as well as up (https://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2015/08/24/chapter-4-turtling-...) — or, equivalently, do away with the up/down orientation entirely, you can have your cake and eat it too.
And as a bonus if you control both slices of bread it's much easier to change the sandwich filling as well! (Though if the original sandwich-builder wasn't careful you might find some sticky residue left over on your bread… maybe someone should take this metaphor away before I do more damage.)
Really enjoyed reading this. Stuff like this is what inspires me to keep pursuing logos language and theorem prover. Things on the roadmap next include stuff like adding first-class inline ASM support. Adding great SPMD and auto-vectorization pipelines, and exploring making verifiable private computation a language primitive when you make things private. If interested, read about some of the planned upcoming enhancements here. :) https://github.com/Brahmastra-Labs/logicaffeine/issues
I really agree with the point about React and Redux. It is crazy that collapsing a comment can take 200ms just because of the framework overhead. We have way too much power in our computers to be okay with this kind of lag in basic UI tasks.
I created a https://ideawell.fly.dev/ just for this particular goal, identify pain points and project ideas from HN discussions
While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.
jquery was an unoptimised mess? it's like 30k minimised and just bridged a bunch of functionality that browsers lacked as well as providing a generic api that let you (often) ignore per-browser implementation and testing of your code
there's no reason to blame it for the types of websites being made either, it doesn't really provide enough functionality to influence the type of site you use it on
Since when did we start using file size as a measure of efficiency or optimization?
Off the top of my head: $() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById, both of which predate jquery by years. Every $('.my-class') created wrapped objects with overhead. Something like $('#myButton').click(fn) involved creating an intermediate object just to attach an event listener you could’ve done natively. The deeper the method chaining got the worse the performance penalty, and devs rarely cached the selectors even in tight loops. It was the PHP of Javascript, which is really saying something.
By the early-2010s most of the library was dead weight since everyone started shipping polyfills but people kept plopping down jquery-calendar like it was 2006.
(I say this as someone who has fond memories of using Jquery in 2007 to win a national competition in high school, after which I became a regular contributor for years)
> $() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById, both of which predate jquery by years.
You have that backwards – jQuery predates querySelector by years.
The reason why getElementById is fast is because it’s a simple key lookup.
Both querySelector and querySelectorAll came well after jquery. I remember it being a big deal when browsers added support for them.
> By the early-2010s most of the library was dead weight
absolutely correct this is because a lot of the shit jquery did was good and people built it into the browser because of that
putting jquery into a site now would be insane but at the time it pushed forward the web by quite a leap
3 counts of “jquery” in the text. once again, which one of them glorifies it?
We should start making low-level enjoyable
Something interesting happened, this is the first time I read him and just after I finish the article and I get into YouTube YouTube recommends me a video from the author with the same title
For those interested here's the talk that this is from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmrBpxAtPrI
The author doesn't understand the point of low level, and strikes me as a person who's programming to "fit in"
I work at Mozilla on their wasm compiler.
The social justice company that laid off many engineers, has questionable finances, and been subsidized by google enough (google needs them to exist) that they became dysfunctional? You're not helping your case WASM never fulfilled it's promises either
> Their view of the world was too high-level. If all you know is React, you have no choices—you can only use React, or meta-frameworks on top of React. But the lower level you can go, the more the tree opens up to you.
This is quite honestly the stupidest thing I ever read, and I read a lot of uncle bob
This is a good reminder that abstractions are supposed to help us solve problems rather than just hide the details. I feel like I spend too much time fighting against tools that try to prevent me from seeing how things really work.
OS is to blame. There should be a way for the OS to tell to the app "offload your state" like phones do. Paging is supposed to achieve this but does not.
this is why i use htmx now in all my apps
Htmx is most defintiely not low-level. It's a mess. Check out datastar, which htmx v4 is trying to become.
A few thoughts:
* These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op.... The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. there are hundreds of registers on modern CPUs, but you can't access them directly and just have to hope the hardware does a good job of register allocation.)
* Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine. E.g. it doesn't have distinct integer and floating point types. Rust represents the machine and is fast, but is not as ergonomic as it could be. OxCaml is inspiring me lately as it's an ergonomic high-level language that also represents the machine. (Scala 3 is also getting there with capture checking, but that is still experimental.) If we want more performance we have to give a way to efficiently write code that can be turned into efficient code.
> hardware
Sure x86 is an absolute mess, but I don't think it's a primary bottleneck. High end x86 cpus still beat high end ARM cpus by a significant margin on raw performance. Even supposing x86/ARM are bottlenecks... yeah a bottleneck at double digit billion ops per second.
> Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine.
C# and Go are already really fast (https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages) languages for the masses and at this point you can compile most things to WASM to get them run in the browser.
You think collapsing a comment quickly would be difficult in x86_64 assembly?
I would expect 1000's of frames of opens/closes per second. Probably an order or two more. The LCD's data bandwidth and our retina's sensitivity would be decisive bottlenecks at far slower speeds.
TLDR: CPUs, that are not getting slower, are not the reason newer software implementations often get slower.
Collapsing a comment is uneconomic in assembly. That's why we have higher level languages and other abstractions.
I think you missed the point of what I'm saying.
The Reddit example is about two different design choices. The DOM is a tree of state that needs to stay in sync with your app state. So how to make that happen without turning your code into a mess. The old Reddit had to first construct the DOM and then for every state change, determine what DOM nodes need to change, find them and update them. Knowing what needs to change gets ugly in a lot of apps. The other alternative is to realize that constructing a DOM from any arbitrary state is pretty much the same as constructing it from initial state. But now you don’t have to track what DOM nodes must change on every state change. This is a massive reduction in code complexity. I will grant that there is something similar to the “expression” problem. Every time there is a new state element introduced it may affect the creation of every node in the DOM. As opposed to every time a UI element is added it may affect every state transition. The first Reddit can be fast, but you have to manage all the updates. The second is slow, but easier to develop. I’m not sure going any lower solves any of that. The React version can be made more efficient through intelligent compilers that are at better at detecting change and doing updates. The React model allows for tooling optimizations. These might well beat hand written changes. The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
The thing is that you can still have high-level abstractions without them needing to be as slow as React. React does a slow thing by default (rerendering every child component whenever state changes, so every component in the UI if top-level state is changing), and then requires careful optimisation to correct for that decision.
But you can also just... update the right DOM element directly, whenever a state changes that would cause it to be updated. You don't need to create mountains of VDOM only to throw it away, nor do you need to rerender entire components.
This is how SolidJS, Svelte, and more recently Vue work. They use signals and effects to track which state is used in which parts of the application, and update only the necessary parts of the DOM. The result is significantly more performant, especially for deeply nested component trees, because you're just doing way less work in total. But the kicker is that these frameworks aren't any less high-level or easy-to-use. SolidJS looks basically the same as React, just with some of the intermediate computations wrapped in functions. Vue is one of the most popular frameworks around. And yet all three perform at a similar level to if you'd built the application using optimal vanilla JavaScript.
We measure computer performance in the billions and trillions of ops per second. I'm sorry but if it an app takes 200ms to hide some comments, the app or the tech stack it's on is badly made.
> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
Hugely multiplayer games consistently update at under 16ms.
I don't know why people always bring up "but networks! but client/server!" when I point out that 100% client-side behavior is slow on the web.
> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
What part of hiding a comment requires a HTTP round trip? In 200ms you could do 20 round trips.
I'm fairly confident that the new reddit React implementation can be improved in performance by a factor of 3x to 10x. I would be interested to hear others who have good reason to explain why not. I can certainly imagine React-like systems that are capable of statically determining DOM influence sufficient to make comment-collapsing negligible.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone with just a little bit of experience that the reddit devs barely know what they are doing. This applies to their frontend as well as backend. For some reason, reddit is also the only major social network where downtime is expected. Reddit throwing 500 errors under load happens literally every week.
Presumably the mobile apps works better; they don’t care very much about the website because they want to push everyone to the app anyway.
Reddit also puts the "eventually" in "eventually consistent". Not in the sense of consistency being driven by events, but in the colloquial sense of "someday". The new message indicator will go away ... eventually. Your comment will show up ... eventually.