Like what? A chat client that uses 1+ GB of RAM and melts batteries faster than a flamethrower? No thanks!
It almost looks like this Electron/JS trend was started by CPU manufacturers who realised that current CPUs have more than enough power for everyday tasks, and needed a way to create demand for even faster CPUs. I’d say Electron (and JS in general) was pretty effective at that.
Lol.
It's a common trend across software. Try comparing office 2003 to office 2013. Office 2003 starts instantly on a modern desktop and uses minimal RAM. Office 2013 takes a good four or five seconds to fire up and uses a few hundred mb memory. And they both do exactly the same thing. With cpu speeds and ssd proliferation there's no incentive to keep things low footprint any more.
Not at this scale though. Office 2013 uses maybe 2x or 3x the amount of RAM compared to Office 2003.
A chat client like Slack routinely uses up to 1GB while a native equivalent would use 100MB or less. We’re talking about a 10x increase here - that’s unacceptable.
Let’s take HexChat (https://hexchat.github.io/) for example - it does most of what Slack does, plus has advanced features not available on Slack like a Lua, Python & Perl plug-in API. It used less than 100MB or RAM after running for days on a Linux machine.
Slack is usually well into the GB of RAM after running for a few days.
The keyword here is fancy. Hexchat is an IRC client, sure, but it is minimalist. That would be like comparing a text file to a PDF and asking why the PDF needs so much more RAM when they're basically the same.
I feel like you're mutating the argument from "electron uses 10x RAM compared to native apps" into "an IRC client doesn't need to use so much RAM"
The proper comparison would be either a full, feature complete native Slack client with all the same bells and whistles that runs under 100mb, OR an electron port of hexchat with its text only interface that uses 1GB+