> Add in that realistically you need to use Webkit (or some HTML renderer), at which point... 100MB is pretty good.
Why do you need an HTML renderer? Slack uses Markdown.
emacs-slack is pretty lightweight …
Why do you need an HTML renderer? Slack uses Markdown.
emacs-slack is pretty lightweight …
The job of programming isn't to reinvent the wheel everywhere, it's just to deliver a product that doesn't suck - with native code, you're implementing a native solution for each feature Slack has or adds. Slack's content is web content.
You're really arguing that an insane amount of extra engineering time should be spent to conserve, at best, an extra 40-50MB of RAM... and this is disregarding how modern RAM works anyway.
That's the underlying issue. If the "protocol" uses HTML, all clients will need to embed a web view.
Because it's objectively easier to do cross-platform GUI development using a single, well-defined and portable API that someone else maintains.
That that API is nowadays de-facto WebKit supporting a HTML/CSS/JS stack is a natural, but unfortunate choice, and it's got a much lower barrier of entry and much less maintenance overhead than, say, Gtk+ or Qt.