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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

I've been heads down into the Electron internals for 2-4 months now and working on a document manager for PDF and web content: https://getpolarized.io/ (self plug)

The inevitable thing that always gets brought up is memory usage.

It's really not insanely bad if the app is important. I wouldn't use it for a calculator but if it's an important app allocating 150MB of RAM seems worth it.

The biggest change here seems to be the build system and the upgrade to Chrome.

The Chrome updates are what's important here. Since Chrome is evergreen if your behind a few versions the standard libraries in NPM just stop working.

I got bit a while back when when they were a bit behind in releases.

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Who doesn't have 150MB to spare?

This laptop has 16GB, why are people hemming and hawing over 150MB???

A lot of electron apps (like Slack) could well use over 1GB.

So I guess I can only run ~16 instances of Slack. Damn...

But that implies you _only_ run Slack.

That means a $1k+ computer with Linux can only run 16 Slack instances. If you're on Windows and aren't as wealthy, the count goes down to 5.

Soon you have to micromanage your computer resources instead of purely focusing on work.

~5 Slacks! Oh, my! How will the proletariat survive?!?!

And yes, obviously if your computer is less powerful you can do less with it. Are you trying to argue that computers are classist because they don't work the same for poor people?

My 1st point is the same everyone criticizing performance bloat is trying to make: running our software in such inefficient way, even though we can, is not good. We could accomplish way more for the users if the underlying stack didn't by default eat so much of our performance budget.

The 2nd point is simply that unless you're only targeting upper class and tech savvy users, 16 free Gb of RAM will not be your baseline.

I use some old laptops, the light one I'm using now (good for python dev) has 2GB. The reasonable option (bulky, heats up) has 4GB, the dev rig which I'm not using because age defects are showing up has 6GB. I don't use Chrome because my proliferation of tabs locks it up. Firefox manages fine (must have over 600 tabs open but FF loads just the current tabstrip bufferized segment.) Technology should be efficient in bad conditions.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect modern software to perform on hardware that’s 5+ years old. The standard ram for midrange laptops now is what, 8gb? At some point you just have to upgrade.

> I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect modern software to perform on hardware that’s 5+ years old.

Why not? If the hardware still works fine, unless we're doing something intrinsically more complex, i don't see a reason why it shouldn't work :S

Because it holds back innovations, which is what we’re talking about.

You can tell when the average viewer of this site learned to program by how irrationally clingy they are to things like the concept of memory management.

It used to matter a lot more, when those people were learning, so now it has to still matter!!!111oneoneeleven

I'm sure those people are laughing at new grad's chugging Atom/VS Codes while they vim away in cultivated peace.

It's one thing when more resources allows you to do something that was not possible without them and entirely different thing when you need to throw gigabytes and gigahertz at programs offering less (because minimalism!!!1111!1). What innovations Electron brings to the table? That web devs can now not only bloat websites but also desktop apps?

More resources should mean that I can do things that were not possible before, or that I can do more things at the same time and not that I can do less because someone is to lazy to learn something new.

Wow, this grandiose "modern software" must be making people's morning coffee and eating their lunch to boot then!

One day I'm sure we'll all have our own robot butlers, but right now it's mainly just allowing software to be made faster and cheaper.

Laptops cheaper than $500 come with 8GB of RAM.

So what? If apps use more ram/cpu it means that I can use less of them.

Then we should stick to Apps like those of the Commodore 64 days, and have thousands of them all open at the same time?

> This laptop has 16GB

Okay? Having a lot of memory does not mean a program should be wasteful, nor does it mean everyone has that.

Yes, it actually does, because it redefines wasteful, and the availability of many-GB computers means a lot of people do have access.

This isn't 2008, we don't need to care about 150MB like we used to.

> because it redefines wasteful

how do people write shit like this and not realize how blatantly user-hostile they are??

Because it's not user hostile at all?

> many-GB computers

Most computers nowadays have 4/8GB, it's not that much memory compared to how much Electron uses.

If you have legitimate reason for using 150MB. Developer laziness is NOT a legitimate reason.

Remind me never to hire you.

In fact, many/most computers these days have 8GB of RAM.

And in any case, less RAM usage usually means less cache thrashing which in turn means acceptable performance.

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