Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Electron. It works pretty well if you're OK with the huge resource usage.

I really despise Electron apps. They always seem bloated and antagonistic toward the native user experience on my platform (eg. inferior keyboard support, hard to integrate with custom tooling like AutoHotkey, etc.). Have I just not used the right ones?

Visual Studio Code is probably one of the best received Electron applications. Tried it?

I'm not him, but yes. It's certainly nowhere near a native Mac app, and apparently that's the absolute best Electron has to offer.

I'm not a fan of them, but they do make desktop linux a bit more viable insofar as you will have desktop binaries for a lot more services than you otherwise would without electron

> It works pretty well if you're OK with the huge resource usage.

Isn't that an oxymoron?

No.

If the user interface is usable and snappy, it is probably fine that it consumes twice as many resources as a similar native app would require for the same result.

Example: Slack.app is a huge memory hog (though not as bad as it was before their rewrite), but it fits decently into OS X and does not lag on me.

I have lots of RAM, so the extra consumption is fine.

Sure, it annoys some programmers that it could be more efficient, but other than them, who cares? Those guys are probably using Emacs or a CLI program as their client anyway.

(I must be a rare breed, since I do email, writing, and programming in Emacs, but not chat)

I think it's a bit of an unfair characterization. I don't use emac or CLI as my client, I enjoy a beautiful UI as much as the next guy but electron is a real bother to me.

I switched from Sublime to VS Code and went from 20MB of RAM usage to 500. Add slack, add discord, you now have GBs of RAM getting eaten up just for the UIs. Most mid-range laptops still only have 8GB of RAM, add a browser to the mix and it's a constant battle to have everything running smoothly, the programs frequently crash due to memory issues. It's a real problem and not solely programmer efficiency-OCD.

Electron is also using an old version of Chromium, and most electron apps are slow to update, making it more insecure than running the web app.

While it's fair to assume most Electron apps are probably running old Electron (and thus Chromium), Electron itself has done a bunch of work to get caught up. Their 6.0 release was the first release to be shipped on the same day as the equivalent Chrome release https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-6-0 their plan is to stay at most one version behind https://electronjs.org/blog/12-week-cadence

Huh.

My laptop has 8 gigs of RAM, and I run many programs simultaneously (usually including several codebase analysis servers behind Emacs, a VirtualBox VM or two, Slack, and of course tens of Chrome tabs, several in development mode), but I don't have anything like the problems you describe. I do use The Great Suspender aggressively in Chrome and that does help a lot.

My Emacs instance itself is extremely tricked out with extensions and usually weighs in between 100 and 200 MB of RAM. Maybe that's the difference - sounds like VS Code eats a lot more.

I'm on a MacBook Pro from 2015 at work, if memory serves.

What setup are you running that handles your needs so poorly?

I'm impressed you can run all that especially multiple VMs on 8gb, I have to close Firefox when I need VMs. I'm on windows 7, on a Dell Inspiron with a RAM and disk upgrade, no special configuration or software. I didn't think to look for an addon to do that, that's pretty cool, I downloaded the Firefox equivalent, might do the trick!

I double-checked now that I'm back at work, and I was flat-out wrong. This machine has 16 GB.

No wonder I don't have issues.

I hope tab suspension helps you. It certainly made Chrome more usable for me (but I do have a bad habit of getting to fifty or seventy tabs open).

God I wish it was only twice the memory. Twice would be acceptable. Discord by itself likes to push to a full gigabyte to show me 50 lines of text with avatars and 0-5 thumbnails of images.

Even worse it's using significant amounts of video card memory, and I have a tenth as much of that.

Fair enough. I've never actually hit performance problems on my current machines, so I've never looked closely at actual resource usage.

Not if it results in only this one application feeling snappy and everything else hanging because of resource consumption. That's especially annoying when you work on a shared server. I used to work in a C++ team where many people used CLion (on a shared development server) and it made us all miserable, because the server would hang from time to time, because all the CLions ate all the RAM (sometimes just one instance could consume more than 50GB). Similar things happened with Eclipse, but a lot less often.

And then the IDE of another guy does its indexing really fast zillions of times per second, great, but then another guy sits there waiting for "git status" to complete for several minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com