Comment by dceddia

Being very conscious of those downsides, I'm putting in extra effort to make sure it's fast. So far it seems to be working!

It uses less CPU than any other Electron-based video apps I've seen (and even less than a few Qt-based editors I tried) and it feels snappy.

I think tools like Figma have shown what's possible when enough attention is paid to performance early on – but yeah, it's one of my main worries with going with Electron and I'm trying to avoid the downsides as much as I'm able.

The ones I have less control over are memory usage and disk space. I'd love to get those down but it seems like that'd require digging into Chromium and ripping things out. Which, honestly, I looked at doing, but that code base is a beast and I'd rather get something into peoples' hands sooner.

On a related note: I think there's a real opportunity for an "Electron Lite", like some kind of custom Electron/Chromium build that turns off stuff you don't need. I suspect it could help disk usage + memory usage + startup time. Chromium's build system has lots of flags that make it seem like you can turn things off. But it didn't work that way when I tried, so I think it probably requires source-level changes, which then means maintaining those patches across Chromium updates etc. But really, though: I don't need WebRTC, or printing, or media codecs, or probably a zillion other things. It'd be so cool to be able to turn those things off at will.