On Tuesday, 1 June 2021 at 21:47:38 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Well, on a Mac I would just embed a WebView which already is
ready in the OS UI framework.
Thanks for the illustration on how you'll eventually proceed with
it on the Mac side of things -I use iPhones since the 4 series
but frankly I never developed on (or used for a significant time)
a modern Mac.
Not that much of a performance bottle neck, unless you push a
lot of data. I wouldn't use it for an audio/graphics editor.
Memory usage is more of an issue though.
It just came to mind the first time I installed and used a linux
distro for a significant amount of time: it was Ubuntu in the 8~9
time-frame circa 2008~2009 (Jaunty Jackalope if memory serves),
and coming from the Windows world, mainly on the Windows server
platform which we usually (and thoroughly) optimized as
workstations for our daily drivers (we can't even stood for a
minute the amount of crap Microsoft dumped on its consumers OSs
-even configuring them with the classical UI dumping animations
and a zillion more things), the first thing I noticed and struck
me was the responsiveness of the GUI: snappy as hell compared to
the usual Windows 7 machines we dealt with at the time, and, I
mean snappy as hell **without** customizing it disabling
animations and the like, this was a responsive GUI
out-of-the-box. It was on gnome 2 of course. The first time I saw
gnome 3 was game over.
Primarily because it cuts down on developer time. It is easy to
change and you can easily configure it for many configurations
(e.g. easy to create a limited features version). This trend
will increase as web component repos become available. At some
point it might become prohibitively expensive to develop
complex user interfaces without web technology.
If we were on slashdot I would undoubtedly mark this as
insightful.
The problem now is that you have to support both Metal, OpenGL
ES, and Direct X. Vulkan isn't well enough supported to be a
convenient target.
IIRC openGL ES is for mobile not for desktop which needs plain
openGL.
Of course individually supporting the three main APIs is a no-go,
that's why I mentioned Vulkan, you say it is not mature, it will
mature. To me Vulkan is like Wayland, there's no going back
regardless whether you/we consider it has merits or not.
History also tells us that hardware GPU abstractions tend to be
weak and not last very long.
Indeed. But the market is so huge nowadays that the stakes are
set higher. Or so I want to believe.
The game industry spends a lot of money supporting/testing
various hardware drivers and working around bugs in said
drivers/hardware.
Indeed. But the game industry has totally different
requirements/expectations for the hardware than we need to write
a classical 2D GUI toolkit. They need APIs close to the hardware
as possible and very often bypass everything in its path seeking
3D performance gains.
At the end of the day, the user will be upset if the
application crashes because of a vulkan-bug/hardware-bug. So in
that context browser-overhead isn't all that bad.
I guess Vulkan will have separate 2D/3D APIs like openGL so this
will be no major concern giving the huge different code base size
for each, but I am talking of pure guess, I will eventually read
about it (at least) out of sheer curiosity.
It is not so much that I disagree, but the hard reality is that
there are few attractive alternatives that are portable and
also cuts down on developer time.
Sad by true.
