Comment by TheRealPomax
1 day ago
It's funny how folks can't even get that number right. Depending on how much you care to optimize, Electron adds 50 to 80 MB to your application. Those multi hundreds of megabyte apps? Yeah that's not because of electron, that's things like "we couldn't be bothered to actually think about the assets we bundled in". 100 uncompressed 16 bit PNG? Sure why not. 20MB worth of fonts because we don't like the built in ones and no we've never heard of subsetting? Let's go. 50MB worth of .json data files that we couldn't be bothered to gzip first? Who's going to notice!
Electron is way bigger than an app needs to be, of course, but those giant apps that you hate, 250MB just for a health tracker? That's not electron being the problem.
Are you defending Electron apps? The audacity :)
Bruno consumes 300MB in RAM. The alternative I am using consumes 25 MB and it is much faster.
The difference is not because some uncompressed PNG or some fonts, it's the Electron architecture that is wasteful, by design.
First off, RAM is not app size, and second, the point of having RAM is literally so it's there to be used. Sure, Chrome is absolute nonsense, but Electron is not Chrome, and an Electron app using 300 MB in memory where data needs to be uncompressed and directly accessible when your computer (including your phone) has gigabytes of the stuff to work with is just... irrelevant? That's pretty much pretending there's a problem for the sake of wanting a problem.
And yes, not using electron will use less memory, which is an excellent reason to go "we're not using Electron". But there's a difference between "We want to use as little memory as possible" and "300MB of RAM on a system with 8 gigabytes of the stuff is a problem". The first is an excellent call. The second is nonsense =)
I could not disagree more.
Space on disk, I have plenty. But the Electron version of many apps feels slow, sluggish, and it takes time to open, it takes time for every click to respond, it is the runtime cost what matters the most.
You say it is irrelevant? It makes a computer in 2026 feel just as fast as a computer from 2001, doing similar tasks, while the computer from 2026 is thousands of times faster.
And I definitely run more than one app at the same time.
This 300MB is the bare minimum used by these apps, in my example just an API tester. A simple "chat" app like Teams, Slack, or Discord wasting so many CPU cycles and so much memory is to me something that should feel like collective shame to our profession. Maybe that's why you disagree with me.