Thomrade

I think we might have worked at the same company. Did it begin with a K?

I think you might think I’m arguing against Godot for app UI. I’m not in fact I’m totally in favour of it! What I’m originally saying is that people who are against it, argue it’d because its inefficient compared to regular UI toolkits. To deny that would be a lie, because yes, it is. But that doesn’t mean you don’t use it. You just understand the trade offs your making, and you try to minimise those tradeoffs with optimisations. If every app ignored optimisations for efficiency, wed be in a much worse situation. All those apps run smoothly in tandem because devs have made the optimisations. Its good practice to try and do the samez if you use Godot for app UI.

I don’t think its that unlikely, depending on the workflow. For example when I’m working on a game in Godot I have Godot itself, aseprite for texture editing, trenchbroom for level editing, audacity for sound editing, a 3d modeling tool, a code editor, messaging app, music player, that’s 8 already and not counting the browser!

Oh they would for sure. Having worked with a few of them they are really aggressive about what will render and when. Usually, only the control that changes is rerendered. With Godot even in low process mode Id imagine it is going to rerender the entire application window when anything changes. I’d have to do some tests. I know from research before there are other optimisations you can make in code to low memory and processor usage.

Not necessarily, as pointed out in another comment, if you had 5, 10 or even more apps open at once, and ALL of them were redrawing entirely every frame there might be some significant impact. In the naive case where you’re build a small app to do one thing, Godot works great as is, once you understand this limitation. I also just learned of a new feature "low processor mode that explicitly prevents full redrawing unless something changes, Ive edited my original comment to mention it.

It does, as is typical of all game engines but there is now a new mode you can enable called “low processor mode” to prevent redrawing unless something changes. I’ve edited my original comment to mention it.

You are absolutely right, I did just discover that Godot 4.2+ supports a new mode called “low processor mode” that prevents redrawing unless something changes. I’ve edited my original comment to mention it. I have tried it out yet myself. That at least would prevend a very heavy amount of redrawing across 20+ apps as from your example.

There’s a lot of naysayers, who insist that game engines like Godot shouldn’t be used for drawing application UI as they tend to defender the entire application every frame, rather than just the parts that get dirty. They’re not wrong in that it’s not the most efficient way to do it, but it still works and is fit for purpose in a lot of cases. I put together a Godot based android app in about a week with very little Godot UI experience. That to me is far more important than absolute efficiency.

Actually it appears this has been addressed:

The last important thing you need to know is that you’ll want to turn on Low Processor Mode in the project settings. This makes it so that the screen only refreshes if something changes, as opposed to the default behavior where it would refresh every frame (which is typical for games).

https://popcar.bearblog.dev/using-godot-for-gui-app-development/#technical-notes-you-should-know

what VPS provider are you using?

Reddit has holdings in Dublin, Ireland, where they have a large contingent of employees. thus they are required to adhere to GDPR.

I use DDG pretty exclusively. I’ve never had issues with it, I set it as default and didn’t think about it after that