
HTML/CSS/script based IDE in 2mb - c-smile
http://sciter.com/htmlcss-desktop-ui-solutions-distribution-sizes/
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mwcampbell
If you _really_ want to optimize download size, you could go a step further
and use each platform's native rendering engine. So, MSHTMl for Windows (the
desktop platform, not WinRT/UWP which nobody actually uses for anything
serious), and WebKit for Mac and Linux.

You've said before that some Windows antivirus programs use Sciter. I wonder
why they didn't opt for MSHTML instead. Is COM/ActiveX that repulsive? Or is
it because Sciter gives them a consistent feature set regardless of the
version of WIndows and IE that the user has installed?

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c-smile
(I am an author of Sciter)

I am comparing distribution sizes of would-be-sciter-based-IDE with
Brackets/Adobe, Visual Code / Microsoft and Atom / GitHub.

Common for all them: they use HTML/CSS/script based UI.

Sciter's IDE uses Sciter Engine as it is.

Others in the set are Chrome/Node.js based. So they appear as include
JavaScript runtime twice - the one in Chrome and the one in Node. But
conceptually you just need JS once.

Sciter has a built-in option to style arbitrary text runs so syntax
highligting does not require DOM change and so it can be done directly in
standard <textarea> editor. Yet Sciter exposes existing HTML/CSS/script
tokenizers to the script. That again makes highligting as fast as possible yet
code reuse of the whole thing.

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smt88
Most of us don't care much about executable or distribution size. Bandwidth
and storage are incredibly cheap. My time isn't. If an IDE has the features I
need, I don't mind an extra 100 MB.

The comparisons made here are based on priorities that almost no one has
anymore. VS Code is a great IDE -- I've never thought about its size.

Let's see some feature comparisons instead.

~~~
c-smile
Agree of course. But if you have small distribution size _and_ feature set you
need - the better.

Yet: I've been told once by UI/UX director of one of 100-top software
companies that he has 40 seconds for the user to decide will he/she use the
app or not. That includes also download time. They did special investigation
of this.

~~~
smt88
I would bet a lot of money that it's more than 40 seconds when the app is a
professional tool and the target audience is software developers.

~~~
c-smile
It takes 2 minutes on broadband connection to get Atom for example. But these
minutes/seconds are nothing of course in case of IDEs, I agree as I said.

All that just does not look right. Two JS instances while you can do the same
in just one. A lot of code in script that is doubling functionality that is
already there. So it is not just about size but effectiveness of the whole
solution.

