Honestly, I think "a daily drumbeat about how bloated, how needlessly complex, how ridiculous most of the world's web applications really are" pretty much describes every HN conversation on any article with even a remote connection to web technologies.
Thankfully web developers are sharing the goodness and distributing 100MB+ executables using NodeJS & CEF so desktop applications can be insanely large too :^)
What would be super awesome would be a daily drumbeat about how to slim down and simplify applications, with working, open-sourced code.
Here, I'll beat a drum a little. Maybe it will inspire somebody.
I just wrote this tiny text-rendering engine, mostly yesterday at lunch. On one core of my laptop, it seems able to render 60 megabytes per second of text into pixels in a small proportional pixel font, with greedy-algorithm word wrap. That means it should be able to render all the comments on this Hacker News comment page in 500 microseconds. (I haven't yet written box-model layout for it yet, but I think that will take less time to run, just because there are so many fewer layout boxes than there are pixel slices of glyphs.) http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/propfont.c
The executable, including the font, is a bit under 6 kilobytes, or 3 kilobytes gzipped.
Thank you, but I don't think it's impressive! It's still nearly an order of magnitude slower than memcpy(). But if we want simpler systems, I think doing experiments like this is a big part of how to get there.
Jeez, you aren't kidding. It's as though, if we bitch enough about the technical deficiencies, the economic and social circumstances that cause them will, I dunno, vanish into thin air I guess. This topic is pretty much just red meat here
Well, bitching isn't that great. But as a web developer myself, it has affected the way I work. Like, there was an article just the other day about how to achieve "lightning fast page loads". I shared it around the office and as a result, 4 people have added new steps to their workflow to help reduce page load latency on our client sites.
The author knew the article would get good reception here, because of how much people complain about page latency, and I knew that page latency is a thing that's important to more people than just me, for the same reason. (My clients mostly don't seem to care, for some reason, but I bet their customers do).
So yeah, having these public conversations can make a difference. We just have to stay positive and constructive.
This is a great point. As much as it can be a bit annoying to see the same conversations over and over again, and as much as we make fun of supposed groupthink, it's all a long slow process of consensus building and idea dissemination.
Thanks for reminding me of that; I was previously sitting here thinking, "oh geez, here we go again!".
