> There is enormous pressure on web engines to improve efficiency and decrease battery/power spend.
Yes. However, these efficiencies are not always translate to better Electron or WebApps on desktop applications.
> With browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better equipped to actively manage and spin down idle tasks.
If your code doesn't allow these idle tasks to spin down, all this work is effectively moot.
> Folks get 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running tons of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc. all at once.
This is possible because of the process suspension capabilities of macOS. Not efficiencies of the applications themselves completely. Evernote is the 6th most power hungry application on my M1 MacBook Air, First two is Zoom and Skype. Third one is Safari. I run Teams and Discord only on my desktop, so I've no 12hr power statistics for them for now.
> The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt app that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire core while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this is a knock on complex native app development, not Qt).
Qt's QML simplifies this stuff tremendously. You can write a whole UI in Qt in five lines with QML, without thinking about any of this stuff, while keeping everything native and nice.
Yes. However, these efficiencies are not always translate to better Electron or WebApps on desktop applications.
> With browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better equipped to actively manage and spin down idle tasks.
If your code doesn't allow these idle tasks to spin down, all this work is effectively moot.
> Folks get 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running tons of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc. all at once.
This is possible because of the process suspension capabilities of macOS. Not efficiencies of the applications themselves completely. Evernote is the 6th most power hungry application on my M1 MacBook Air, First two is Zoom and Skype. Third one is Safari. I run Teams and Discord only on my desktop, so I've no 12hr power statistics for them for now.
> The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt app that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire core while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this is a knock on complex native app development, not Qt).
Qt's QML simplifies this stuff tremendously. You can write a whole UI in Qt in five lines with QML, without thinking about any of this stuff, while keeping everything native and nice.