Acme: http://acme.cat-v.org/ It can do everything Emacs can but it's so lightweight it almost doesn't exist. Its power comes from the fact that it brings your external tools together.

It can be programmed using its filesystem (9p) interface, and extended by adding plumber(4) rules.

A demo by Russ Cox: https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M

> I was always under the impression that Go never had a great optimizing compiler. It was never a primary focus given the limited developer resources.

It's an intentional choice, that's why it compiles code so fast. Also because of that it's a lot simpler than say GCC. Before Go, the Plan 9 C compiler was designed in a similar manner too (I think the Go compiler was forked from it).

I think the simplicity aspect is even more important than the compiling speed. It's easier and cleaner to keep the compiler simple and write optimized assembly code by hand when it's needed. That way, the compiler doesn't get so messy (fewer bugs, easier to maintain...) and the written program is of better quality (humans can produce better code than compilers).

How often have you met compiler bugs? Also, humans absolutely can’t produce better code than compilers, at least not reliably. All those minor improvements that compilers routinely do does add up. And noone wants to write arcane hacks that make code unmaintainable and may not even provide a performance benefit (CPUs are finicky beasts, sometimes the seemingly worth option is faster)

I very much want my computer to work as hard as it can to make my code more performant for free. What I would like to see more is a separate debug and release build mode, where the former can go as fast as it can without optimizations, while the latter can be as slow as it wants and result in the most optimal binary it can produce. Zig does that for example.

> That's usually because the app is just a shell around the site, designed to collect data and show notifications.

I think the real reason sites like Reddit want you to install their app is that they can't both have fancy JS and speed.

Web browsers are ridiculously complex and slow, and slow means bad UX. An app is much simpler (and thus faster) than a JS-heavy "web app" on Chromium/whatever (which is many millions of lines of code).

HN is fine with just a website and doesn't need an app because it doesn't have fancy JS.