Imagine being someone in the semiconductor industry reading this. You're at the absolute pinnacle of high-tech and are approaching the limits of material reality to realize a 20% faster CPU. It's a true super human accomplishment.
Software developers: well yes, 99% of the cycles I use are completely needless, but it's still plenty fast enough!
Which we justify with the idea that a framework like React is abstract, hence expressive and productive.
Excuse me? Abstract? React is absurdly low level.
25 years ago I was coding in Borland products. You visually drag you UI together. Link events with a click. Drag data sources and fields into UI to do two-way binding. Tooling chain? What tooling chain. There's a build and a run button. No weird text config files or CLI crap. And every setup is the same.
25 years later we're worrying about painting frames. We're pissing away impressive hardware performance whilst simultaneously not actually achieving abstraction. That's a double fail.
The state of things is ridiculous. But I think that this is how people operate, in general: they just fill the available space, use all the available resources.
React (or other web frameworks) have a unique advantage. They run everywhere.
Any device with a modern web browser can run a React application. Sure, Electron and the alternatives are resource hungry, but they allow developers to create true cross-platform applications.
Sure, there are other ways to create a cross-platform app, but none of those approaches allow you to tap into the massive number of web developers that exist.
I'm not super familiar with the space nowadays, but a few years ago cross-platform apps were full of compromises. Mobile apps wouldn't look native (tiny things like a being a pixel or two off) or they wouldn't support Linux. Maybe it's better with Flutter -- I've heard good things about it.
Additionally, Electron apps not only work as a standalone app, but you can often access a near identical version of the app in your browser. For example, you can either download Discord or Slack as a desktop app, or open them in your browser.
I'm not saying this comes for free; these apps are very heavy, and Flutter/React Native would probably produce more efficient apps.
Software developers: well yes, 99% of the cycles I use are completely needless, but it's still plenty fast enough!
Which we justify with the idea that a framework like React is abstract, hence expressive and productive.
Excuse me? Abstract? React is absurdly low level.
25 years ago I was coding in Borland products. You visually drag you UI together. Link events with a click. Drag data sources and fields into UI to do two-way binding. Tooling chain? What tooling chain. There's a build and a run button. No weird text config files or CLI crap. And every setup is the same.
25 years later we're worrying about painting frames. We're pissing away impressive hardware performance whilst simultaneously not actually achieving abstraction. That's a double fail.