Memory Footprint of GUI Toolkits | Hacker News Reader

Memory Footprint of GUI Toolkits

szibele.com

51 pointsrszibele10 comments

Flutter's memory use is between 80-100MB??!! That's just as much as Carlo [1] or Lorca [2], that use Chrome as the front end! This is NOT what I expected, and certainly not in line with the "lean, performant" GUI marketing that flutter claims

[1]: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

[2]: https://github.com/zserge/lorca

There's an update at the end of the article saying that all Flutter builds are currently debug, and have tools enabled.

OR - since flutter re-uses chromium code (Skia, etc ..) and possibly has an IPC architecture similar to a browser to isolate the dart VM from rendering/painting pipeline, flutter's memory and CPU footprint is likely to be close to chromium, despite best efforts.

Maybe someone from the flutter team can comment on this as I'm postulating here.

You don't need someone from the Flutter team to tell you that that's jumping to wild conclusions. Skia is a mere blip in Chromium (both in terms of source code and resource usage).

It would be interesting to see input latency comparison.

What was the electron version? Would be nice to see if it decrease or increase with releases.

Also it would be nice to benchmarck with https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo With an up to date chrome instance (76) And optionally with chrome canary. And optionally again with some chrome flags: E.g https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.digitaltrends.com/computing/...

Cordova and geckoview would be nice to test too.

But please at least test on modern electron AND Carlo to show us how modern Web app Empty window compare to other GUIs empty window.

I don't expect it to be much better, but if the author included two Java frameworks, he could as well have included SWT.

A lot of those are not GUI toolkits.

Seems that the cross platform GUI toolkit with least memory footprint is FLTK...

Nope, nana. http://nanapro.org/en-us/

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