We're looking at about 60MB on macOS for a small diagram. Another thread reports Win asking for 175MB.
But as you say, it was electron or nothing for us, no way we can justify native apps.
But as you say, it was electron or nothing for us, no way we can justify native apps.
Honestly in an age where memory is so cheap I'd much rather have an Electron app for every conceivable thing (which take a fraction of the time to create) as opposed to fully fledged applications that only do a few things.
E: Having the tab open in Chrome appears to use more memory for me[0], perhaps because of the extensions I use?
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/HyperX-FURY-DDR3-Memory-Module/dp/B...
Exact data is hard to find, but, for example, http://www.buildcomputers.net/power-consumption-of-pc-compon... claims 2 to 3 watt per stick. That seems very little compared to CPU, video card or backlight, but your RAM more or less uses that _continuously_. Power usage doesn't go down if you don't use your laptop/tablet/phone, or don't use part of the memory (this may be an area where innovation is possible). So, power drain while your laptop/tablet/phone isn't is used may be dominated by RAM power requirements.
As I said: hard data is difficult to find, so I don't know how big this effect is. I think power usage is an important reason why Apple keeps the amount of RAM in their tablets and phones fairly low, though.
http://alternativeto.net/software/electron/
One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.
This isn't Electron's fault. I have plenty Java apps just as guilty.
I do wish Slack was a better case for Electron. JavaScript isn't immune from leaky bad patterns, just the same as other langs/environments.
> it was electron or nothing for us
People forget this when demanding native versions. Creating multiple native apps is not free.