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Comment by PieUser | Hacker News Reader

It's not just RAM it's also disk space usage. For instance Atom (text editor) takes more than 800MB of disk space on my Mac.

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Well that doesn't tell me much about Electron, the latest Visual Studio Code for macOS that I just downloaded weighs less than 200MB.

A 200 MB text editor, no matter how fancy, is also insane.

Is someone forcing you to use Electron based tools against your will? The last three comments you’ve made on HN are gripes about it, it sounds like you’ve got an axe to grind.

Back when I had four megabytes of ram I wouldn’t have been furious over a 50kb editor. 200mb isn’t a lot when most developers are working on systems with 16gb or more of memeory.

My last comment on HN was four months ago, and incidentally also about Electron. No, nobody has a gun to my head, but a sadly increasing number of applications are Electron based, some of which I'm "forced" to use.

Yes, I hate Electron with a passion. It's a slow, wasteful framework for lazy developers who can't be bothered learning Qt or something else non-silly. IMHO.

The comparison is silly: in 4mb-era one didn’t have to run docker instances and assorted VMs and databases (yes, you can do it in the cloud, but that’s not cheap). Most dev stacks were CPU-bound, now they are mostly memory-bound. That’s why devs are memory-hungry, not because they want 3d emojis.

I’ve had no problem running 10+ containers while running Slack, Chrome, and a few other Electron based apps simultaneously and have never really had problems except for the heat it generates.

If a dev is working on a less capable machine I guess I can see why this is a problem, but a rather simple one to solve, close Slack, it’s a distraction to focused work anyways :)

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