Engineer and coder that likes memes.

  • 3 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Valuable input! I actually am an undergrad student. There are a lot of frameworks out there that support writing languages, with MPS being one of them.

    If I’d start from scratch again and had a little more time, I’d frankly try writing an interpreter myself, instead of trying to conform to weird framework syntax, which I won’t be able to reuse in any other context.

    Saying syntax design is fiddly is an understatement. I focused very hard on getting an abstract syntax somehow finished before working on generation in my first iteration. Then I had so much technical debt, that I couldn’t get anything to work and had to rewrite a lot. So I scrapped it all and started again, starting with top level concepts including generation and only implementing some lower level ones, once everything around it worked properly.








  • Recently switched jobs from maintaining a 15 year old Windows Forms .NET Framework legacy codebase.

    At the new job we stick to Clean Architecture, use unit and integration tests, have a code generation tool, actually make nice use of generics and use dependency injection. Also agile processes, automatic build tools, whatever. The difference is night and day and I’m so glad my ex boss fired me because I told him he’s an asshole and his codebase is shit.



  • Ha! I’m partially looking at this issue in my bachelor’s thesis.

    It’s not at all necessary to embed a browser, but it’s really easy to transfer your web app to a “near native” experience with stuff like electron, ionic, cordova, react native or whatever other web stuff is out there. The issue is mostly that native APIs are complicated and relying on web views or just providing your own “browser” is a relatively easy approach.

    Stuff like Flutter, Xamarin or .NET MAUI compile depending on the platform to native or are interpreted by a runtime. There’s a study I use that compares Flutter to React Native, native Java and Ionic on Android and finds that unsurprisingly the native implementation is best, but is closely followed by Flutter (with a few hiccups), with the remainder being significantly slower.

    The thing is. I don’t think these compiled frameworks lag behind in any way. But when you have a dev team, that’s competent in web development, you won’t make them learn C#, Xaml, Dart or C++, just to get native API access - you’ll just let a framework handle that for you because it’s cheaper and easier.

    Edit: To add some further reading. This paper and this one explore the different approaches out there and suggest which one might be “the best”. I don’t feel like they’re good papers, but there’s almost no other write up of cross-platform dev approaches out there.

    Edit2: I also believe that the approach “we are web devs that want access to native APIs” may be turned around in the future, since Flutter and now also .NET offer ways to deploy cross-platforn apps as web apps. I’ll get back to writing the thesis now and stop editing.