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New Text Editor from GitHub

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So much complicated technology for so little (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-03-02 15:25 (#8P)

I'm not the target audience for this software, but I'm starting to realize I'm not the target audience for a lot of tech coming out lately. But when I think about the energy, resources, and tech that goes into making a text editor out of browser technology, it depresses me. What happened to the days when all you needed was a good C library and maybe something like ncurses?

Yeah, I know, get offa my lawn.

But all these additional layers cause complexity and slowness and latency and so on. And the end result isn't much better than what we're doing at present.

I find the whole thing depressing, even if it's a technological feat. Reminds me of that XKCD cartoon called 'Abstraction' :

An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the Xnu kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko Renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second ... because I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over. I am a God."


PS - nice work Pipedot rendering block quote! This site is gorgeous.

Re: So much complicated technology for so little (Score: 2, Interesting)

by jonh@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 16:53 (#94)

  • Well, if there's any truth to the rumours that Moore's Law is finally slowing down or stopping, then that seems to be a big opportunity for people like us. There's surely a lot of code out there which can be sped up in fairly trival ways, and if you have a track record for making other people's code run faster, then you should be pretty busy, once the option to 'throw new hardware at it' goes away...
  • On a somewhat tangential note, here's a C++ to Javascript compiler , which may either amaze or appall you (I'm not sure whether to be amazed or appalled myself, but it can run Qt demo apps in the browser ).
  • I've been away from the site for about 2-3 days, and when I come back we have comment moderation! Does bryan actually ever sleep? :D

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Time Reason Points Voter
2014-03-06 18:41 Interesting +1 bryan@pipedot.org

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