Comment by zahlman
3 hours ago
> The terminal is capable of flexbox now.
You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.
3 hours ago
> The terminal is capable of flexbox now.
You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.
That’s the tip of a conceivable iceberg but exactly. Also look at kitty graphics protocol.
Look at the amount of engineering resources we pour into OS GUI toolkits and then browsers. Those layers of complexity aren’t there because we stood back and said, “given what we know in 2026 how should we design a GUI compositor?”. The majority of the stack is written how it is by archeological happenstance. One generation adds on top of the prior since the 60s.
I’d say start from the terminal, fix the rendering limitations that drove the split from terminal and then to the browser. If we pin down efficient GUI, we could have machines that cover non graphics workloads which is the vast majority with solar and the equivalent of a 6502.
The amount of energy wasted on modern stacks relative to the tasks being delivered is incalculable.
I 100% agree, and this isna big reason why I find the current state of education so suboptimal. Everyone just goes on to do webdev, completely ignoring the lower levels and taking it all for granted. The thing is, there's no real innovation to be done that high up the stack. When you're that high you mostly just write glue code to stick parts someone else wrote together. Real innovation comes from quite a few levels down the stack, starting at the native code level downwards.
Like you pointed out, the current stack is heavily unoptimized and has a terrible architecture; it's only the way it is because of happenstance and tides of the market (companies always reaching for faster over better). An actual "nirvana" in computing like the other guy said would require bulldozing a good chunk of our current stack, keeping only kernels and core utilities, if even.
I really wish we had a bigger focus on getting good foundation instead of making yet another JS framework and SaaS, but then again, who's paying developers to actually do something of quality nowadays?