How exactly will you cut the fat in Electron? What’s a hello world like?
I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does).
I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does).
One avenue would be to use a different, more light-weight engine; https://github.com/zserge/webview, for example, can use the local platform’s engine, which is likely to be somewhere between a little and a lot more efficient than Electron/Chrome. Running FastMail with the MSHTML renderer via the Rust bindings for that (DPI scaling issues, but meh), it starts at about 60MB but is easy to get over 80MB with some use. Still quite a lot less than Electron/Chrome.
On my laptop with 16GB, it's certainly been at least a few months since I've done anything that made it hit swap.
> I said "unintentionally" as a hedge for corner cases like VMs where you are likely aware of the limits.
I was aware of the limited memory of the VM, but almost everything I run there is a text-mode application, so it usually doesn't matter. Honestly, I thought that Slack would fit easily in the free memory, but I'm logged into 3 teams, so it ate more than I expected. And it's a spinning rust drive; swapping sucks, and it slows down the host OS at the same time.
It's an avoidable situation; just run Slack under the host's Windows, instead of in the Linux VM. But it remains the case, in my uses, that memory has caused more issues than CPU, and that CPU has caused more issues than battery drain. I don't know why everyone else focuses on memory so much...I perceive my own issues as kind of a corner case.