Item — HN Reader

I downvoted paule89's comment because it felt like a cheap shot at an established product with well-known pros and cons.

Yes, Electron apps consume a bunch of RAM. Yes, Rust needs you to deal with data lifetimes. Yes, Go still doesn't have generics. Yes, Haskell has a steep learning curve if you learned imperative languages first.

No, restating those facts on HN at every opportunity is not constructive.

4 comments

Rust is built on lifetimes, Go is designed to not have Generics, Haskell will always be weird. A UI toolkit has no inherent reason to use a large amount of resources, so there is some value in noting that they either don't care or haven't managed to fix it yet.

Rust is built on lifetimes but the compiler could definitely infer them better. Not only from my experience, but all attempts to introduce coworkers / anyone else to Rust usually meets a "this 'a thing is ugly and awful and I hate it".

Really it was more a design decision on the language part than something it was "built" on. In 99% of cases the compiler can identify where exactly you need to annotate lifetimes to sate itself. They are only there for explicitness. Tagged lifetimes will help a lot with this, because it is much more intuitive for anyone using any other language to say "ok I need to say result R lives as long as argument A that makes sense" vs "stick an 'a on everything" and have functions that have nothing to do with generics looking like generics to the average joe.

I know I personally have written function signatures to take (or return) owned data in Rust just to avoid having to lifetime annotate the whole thing. It is just a chore that most of the time is just boilerplate to "make it obvious" to readers of code, despite almost every situation I see lifetime annotations I can straightforwardly understand that the & in the return is lifetime bound to the & in the arguments or the struct field it comes from.

Perhaps not but not all of us follow such things as closely as you might so the assumption that it's common knowledge is not necessarily accurate.

You're absolutely right that not everyone seeing this comment tree knows the details of Electron's memory usage. But I don't think that GGP's original comment was aimed to educate those people about the issue. To me it just sounded like a quip aimed at getting some cheap points from the choir.

Yeah I could see how if you are used to seeing such posts it would come as more of a slight but from my perspective it's good to know people's gripes about a product having not followed much about this before - especially if some people might be trying it out as a result of the article. The ambiguity of purpose is the bane of internet comments.

It's a hugely beneficial visual when they are deciding what to prioritize on the roadmap going forward.

It's input directly from their user base about what they want in their work environment.

Do you think this thread is the best place for that input? Or that the input is valuable enough to post at any opportunity?

For the record, I disagree with both of those statements.

Yes, I do think this is the best place for that input. People post things on HN, and there is a comment section where we talk about the thing. What else would be in a thread about a thing?

Noted.

I wish that I could upvote this twice.