Ramin Honary on Nostr: npub197lln…9rmtn npub1qmshc…3wxk4 > "All of this had to crawl through the ...
npub197llnzpwfsg9h3mjcre307caj8mh8ea7v55395635qlu6qq6fd9q99rmtn (npub197l…rmtn) npub1qmshcslmwan3erj3ulczepe8q8a8xdyfkndnk8fudgtg8ccwg6zqr3wxk4 (npub1qms…wxk4)
> "All of this had to crawl through the underlying networking stack and OS services. It's wasteful."
> "Browsers emulated OSs. Modern OSs now behave like browsers. Why not ditch the web stack middleman, and adapt modern OSs to take on new responsibilities."
Yes, I feel exactly the same way. You are definitely not the first person to bring this up with me. Actually, I have been talking about this with lots of software engineers over the past few years and there tends to be widespread agreement that the Web as an app platform is wasteful, and needlessly slow. The fact that there are whole programming languages that compile to JavaScript is evidence that JavaScript and the whole programming model for the Web is all wrong.
I think the problem is the Web has too much momentum, it is "too big to fail." There are lots of good alternatives to the web as an app platform, but no general consensus on which one to use.
One bad alternative is shipping around Docker containers for everything. This is even worse than the browser because you are shipping (sometimes) literally a whole OS to support the application for which it was programmed.
Good alternatives are something Qt with Python scripting. I like Gtk even better because it actually creates a database of APIs (called "GObject Introspection") that let you automatically bind any programming language to the Gtk APIs, which in turn call directly into the operating system's native desktop environment. As a result, Gtk apps tend to have a fairly consistent UI/UX between Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and potentially iOS and Android with a bit more work. They have "cut-out the middleman" as you called it. But Gtk is not a popular choice, unfortunately
In my opinion, Scheme bindings to Gtk would be the best alternative to the Web, if only it were a more popular choice. But this is the technology I chose for my prototype Emacs clone.
> "All of this had to crawl through the underlying networking stack and OS services. It's wasteful."
> "Browsers emulated OSs. Modern OSs now behave like browsers. Why not ditch the web stack middleman, and adapt modern OSs to take on new responsibilities."
Yes, I feel exactly the same way. You are definitely not the first person to bring this up with me. Actually, I have been talking about this with lots of software engineers over the past few years and there tends to be widespread agreement that the Web as an app platform is wasteful, and needlessly slow. The fact that there are whole programming languages that compile to JavaScript is evidence that JavaScript and the whole programming model for the Web is all wrong.
I think the problem is the Web has too much momentum, it is "too big to fail." There are lots of good alternatives to the web as an app platform, but no general consensus on which one to use.
One bad alternative is shipping around Docker containers for everything. This is even worse than the browser because you are shipping (sometimes) literally a whole OS to support the application for which it was programmed.
Good alternatives are something Qt with Python scripting. I like Gtk even better because it actually creates a database of APIs (called "GObject Introspection") that let you automatically bind any programming language to the Gtk APIs, which in turn call directly into the operating system's native desktop environment. As a result, Gtk apps tend to have a fairly consistent UI/UX between Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and potentially iOS and Android with a bit more work. They have "cut-out the middleman" as you called it. But Gtk is not a popular choice, unfortunately
In my opinion, Scheme bindings to Gtk would be the best alternative to the Web, if only it were a more popular choice. But this is the technology I chose for my prototype Emacs clone.