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Recently I was doing some mean stack development ram was maxing out 8 GB and system was struggling to run smoothly Mongo alone was hogging around 1.5 GB and webpack was hogging 1 GB there are three seperate expressjs servers hogging 500 mb each

And then there was slack

Finally an argument that is concrete and understandable! Seriously, this is the first comment I've read that is tangible as opposed to theoretical. All the other complaints are on the basis of being morally offended by the ratio of resource usage vs. application functionality.

The nice thing about slack is that it will run about anywhere. The app on my phone magically knows if the app is not running on my laptop and will then and only then send me notifications. But, I'm not suggesting this as a solution for you -- best productivity killer I know is having to pay attention to yet another device while trying to get work done.

Depends on your environment, but I have of one very effective and successful coworker who just flat out refuses to use Slack. The number of companies where that is acceptable is probably limited. Unfortunately.

> I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t.... It works just fine, in my experience.

From experience, using the bridge means pinging the admin on slack about it, and convincing them that it's even worth doing, and then being stuck in "The IRC Room", instead of the others rooms in which people are actually communicating.

Allow me to humbly suggest:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

I use it extensively for everyday Slack, where I don't care much about inline media and inline formatting. And for a text client, weechat + this plugin handle it pretty gracefully.

I know I am really late to this, but one of the things I have been meaning to try is running Electron apps that have Web Apps with [Fluid](http://fluidapp.com). I think this may give me the perks without some of the drawbacks. I am not really sure, but it is an experiment I would like to try out.

I've never heard of Fluid before, but it seems to be a glorified shortcut with minor features such as notification badges. I really can't tell how this can integrate with Electron at all.

Electron would have you write a web app and package it as an app installed to your Applications folder just like any native app. You'll write this code in JS, HTML, CSS and use Electron APIs.

Fluid also would have you write this in JS, HTML, CSS but use Fluid APIs instead. The two compete for the same role in that sense.

With Fluid, you don't do anything from the web developer's prospective. The Fluid app just packages a Web site as a separate application. So, what this means that any user can take a Web site and make that a separate app if they want it.

> when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem.

Not really, unless you're using most of your RAM or you treat this as a fundamental principle. I've never checked my Slack RAM usage, and I'm sure it's higher than if they built a great native app, but it's also never had any performance problem with Slack or any other application (okay, except for Eclipse, but I stopped using that when Android Studio came out).

> It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP

And there's the key. You have a very specific use case that is probably extremely rare. I'm a full-time developer and as far as I know I've never been low on RAM on my first generation Retina MBP.

People are less likely to be spinning up vms but may have far less ram to start with and the more apps they use that are wasteful of power and ram the more likely this becomes an issue for them.

It is truly strange to hear being resource constrained being described as a special case in computing.

Last time I taught undergrads (last semester) their computers were far from anything as good as we'd have. If I asked them to run anything remotely demanding, it really taxed their laptops.

We really do need to be more mindful of resource usage. I'd rather write my own lightweight clone of something I want than use an Electron-based hog. There are menubar-only apps that come with an entire Electron dependency.

Why is that strange for personal computer usage? How common do you think it is for users to experience a performance problem caused by low memory? I'm genuinely surprised that we could apparently have such opposing intuitions. My intuition is that it is exceedingly rare.

Your intuition is badly formed because it ignores how crappy real peoples computers are. The world is full of really bad computers that people don't upgrade because their computer is a low priority item for them and they have lots of other more important things to put their money towards like food shelter, and medicine.

Further their machines are full of software that runs all the time for no reason including but not limited to multiple redundant antivirus that are trying in vain to scan everything in real time in a vain attempt to prevent the next malware infection from taking hold.

Various services like file system indexing and virus scans run at inconvenient times and render things slower than before.

Laptops are super prevalent because their portability is more important than power. Its not at all unusual to keep using the same machine for 5-8 years as long as it still works.

Real people have bad computers with bad specs and in a massive number of cases the browser is already using a significant portion of the entire computers resources.