Cross-platform email client with React and CoffeeScript | Hacker News Reader

Cross-platform email client with React and CoffeeScript

medium.com

71 pointsrpeden18 comments

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So the headline is wrong, right? It's not just HTML. It's HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

With a massively bloated run-time for the desktop edition (i.e., Electron).

Thanks, we've updated the submission title.

> You’d be surprised (I was!) at how much memory leak your JavaScript has if you don’t monitor it.

What are the most recommended ways to monitor for leaks in client-side javascript?

You can log memory usage in some browsers but the memory usage is bucketed so you will not get a fine grained number. At Asana, we look at the 99th percentile and then use Chrome to take heap dumps.

So, another electron app for Desktop? I've heard anecdotal comments on HN about how electron based apps frequently hog resources and such an overkill as a replacement for native apps. Anybody know of a dumb cross platform wrapper that does just enough HTML/JS for apps like this to work without the bloat?

Does the "bloat" in Electron come from the wrapper or from the rendering engine?

If, by "rendering engine", you mean the full instance of Chromium being run to drive the app... the full instance of Chromium that nothing else on your machine shares... yeah, I guess you could say it's the rendering engine.

You know Electron runs on top of Nodejs. How do you know it's not that?

Sure, it could also be that! But Chromium is undoubtedly a significant part of the problem.

I guess I'm wondering about OP's comment and whether a slimmer wrapper would make much of a difference.

No doubt a modern browser engine like Chromium is an incredibly complex thing and requires a lot of resources, etc.. Would optimizing the wrapper even very aggressively make any difference?

No, in this case they are using PhoneGap for mobile. I also think that the electron hate is overhyped. If you really don't want the overhead, use the website instead. (eg Slack)

I also think that the electron hate is overhyped. If you really don't want the overhead, use the website instead. (eg Slack)

So... you think the Electron hate is "overhyped".

And then recommend people not use Electron apps if they are concerned about bloat.

This strikes me as a bit of a contradiction...

Desktop apps are built on top of Electron and mobile apps on top of PhoneGap.

The Telegram client is a good example of how to do this right [0].

You can acheive this in python w/ pyQt/pySide as well... just include a QWebView and hook into the javascript [1].

Avoiding the whole server & network stack makes things run obviously lighter.

[0] https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6447011/pyqt-pyside-webk...

I believe QWebView w/ QtWebKit was deprecated in favor of QWebEngine which is Chromium thereby causing the same problems as Electron (bulky, multi-process which is the way of the browser these days). Granted QtWebKit appears to be maintained in a fork at [0].

If someone wanted to use Chrome, a more bare-bones approach w/ Qt might be CEF. An example in Python is here [1].

0 - https://github.com/annulen/webkit (see the wiki) 1 - https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython/blob/master/examples/...

Philippe here, one of Missive co-founders. Email client job is to render HTML emails, whatever tech you choose for the UI, you still end up rendering HTML. Electron makes sense.

Only use a framework if you know what you need!

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