Posted by wondersky 4 hours ago
Curious what the R&D / efficiency development ROI is on reducing memory footprint. I suppose we should both consider current ROI and near future ROI (as the price of memory will likely stay high for at least another 1-2 years).
Source: I was Cloudflare's CTO.
But it's convenient. I can't really fault people for using it.
I'm sure exact pinning is sometimes the real intended case for certain apps, as it is a value in certain ways, but I'd bet at least half the Electron apps I have running now would happily be using the same shared instance of the same LTS Chromium+Node if it were the out of the box behavior to be able to do so.
One thing that I really hope we see out of the LLM revolution: a return to native applications. You could argue that Electron cross-platform apps made sense when you had to pay a team to maintain two or three (at least) native clients; you can't make that argument anymore when the marginal cost of a line of code is $0.00.
I guess developers really prioritize velocity or ease over everything. Or maybe it's business pressure or directives?
Platform-specific views simply aren't. For simple applications they might make sense, but at a certain point devs just want the shit to work. Electron solved that.
I do agree that LLMs & co should contribute to reversing this trend, though. I don't really see why you couldn't try to ship (true) native now.
Most of the projects that I have seen are trying to push past that and get towards actual native-native (non-webview) rendering because despite being an even bigger pain and more work, they come out a lot better than the webviews.
Yes, they're getting their bonus. No, we can't hire and onboard more people to deal with the insane demands being made as a result. Why do you ask?
The sin is this ridiculous era of every program shipping its own runtime. I'm headed for real down votes, but this is the same lazy culture that's taken over everywhere: go and rust both ship these huge statically compiled binaries.
When you are a company, you're only running a handful of different workloads/apps on any given box, so the statically compiled price doesn't bite you. But as users, going back to dynamically linking and making the incremental cost of loading an app not also have to carry the entire world with it is such an obvious return, and one that alas seems to not be in progress at all.
The agentic age is, I hope, going to question a lot of old assumptions & needs about what we want to run. Having lots of small resident little user agencies, compiled small scripts that are attributed to a user, is something I believe will happen, but I'm less convinced we'll recognize the face of it as it happens, that the tales will be told.
Tools like agent-substrate, ax, scion, are this interesting mix between agents, serverless, and kubernetes. I find it fascinating. (For hire on this.) https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
> The sin is this ridiculous era of every program shipping its own runtime. I'm headed for real down votes, but this is the same lazy culture that's taken over everywhere: go and rust both ship these huge statically compiled binaries.
Go and Rust are pretty efficient too, if your architecture isn't trash. If it is, they still probably are more efficient than Electron
Client-side: lol sucks to be you
> Why doesn't the Zone Builder just rebuild the setting that changed?
> It should, and that is where we ended up. However, proving when it was safe took most of the work. A record event identifies what changed. A zone event can come from many Cloudflare products, may not say why the zone changed, and can alter data shared by several zones with the same name. Choosing too much work wastes capacity. Choosing too little can leave stale or incorrect DNS data at the edge.
Re-reading the start of the post with that in mind, I'm fairly sure the article was generated by LLM.
With that said, curated it sure is. Aside from the smelly phrasing, the actual content is fairly dense and engaging. Not all of Cloudflare's LLM-generated posts are this good, but this one is fairly alright.
700 changes per second is 1.8 billion changes per month. I guess 10 changes per top level domain per month is quite low, which suggests a very long tail distribution, which makes sense, given that most websites are just a static page a business sets up once, with DNS changes maybe once every few years.
700 changes per second implies 15% of all domains are changing daily, which is almost certainly not the case.
I imagine a renewal is a change event to, at least change the expiry, and renewals are constantly happening.
A domain renewal is an update at the registry, but there's no update in DNS at any level. If a domain expires, it would be removed (or at least changed) in the TLD DNS, but the authoritative DNS for the domain wouldn't necessarily update... it would just become orphaned.