But I wonder if it's good for us in the end. Which is classic programmer thinking, and generally a good strategy. It always seemed like the React team was trying to solve a really really hard problem in order to avoid solving an easier problem a bunch of times. Putting something like that in your app means for a much more complex debugging process.
#Slack desktop app is unresponsive code#
It's like having an AI look at your code and decide how it should actually run. Rather than saying "draw a profile pic" and then "a profile pic means these DOM manipulations", with React you add another layer: "hey, oracle, what does the whole page look like this now, and what DOM manipulations should we do to get there?" React introduces a layer of indirection into your rendering. Why would Slack need to debug into their view rendering library on customer machines? It's not their code that's made accessible here, it's React's.
![slack desktop app is unresponsive slack desktop app is unresponsive](https://winbuzzer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Slack-desktop-app-official-1-696x377.jpg)
It does show a little of React's dark side though. So on OSX, we need to run a VM, so there goes another gig of memory. Its great if you're on Linux, but few people are. The only reason most people need massive performance beasts is because we've pushed abstraction hell and bad engineering practices, so all of our tools suck.ĭocker is another offender in recent times. The cost of the machine would be substantially lower.
![slack desktop app is unresponsive slack desktop app is unresponsive](https://pulseasync.com/assets/zapier-slack-gmail-workflow.png)
Battery life would be substantially higher. You make fun of chromebooks, but imagine how much more interesting your work would be if you could use a machine with that performance. If we focus on performance optimizing the apps we use, it opens up a wide range of new computing hardware. EVs are fundamentally better for the future.
![slack desktop app is unresponsive slack desktop app is unresponsive](https://www.saintlad.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/svchost-high-CPU-usage-windows-updates-1024x597.png)
Its a similar argument to electric versus ICE cars just because gas is cheap doesn't mean we shouldn't support EVs. Just because we _have_ the resources to allow applications to bloat doesn't mean we should be alright with it. Microsoft Word, with a multi-page complicated document, is using 200mb. Slack on my computer, with five teams, consumes 1.8gb of RAM.