Comment by TheRealPomax
19 hours ago
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.