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I get that it would have a startup cost but I'm shocked that it uses more memory. Everyone complains about what a memory hog electron apps are and I assumed it was because of JS. But maybe we need something other than micro benchmarks to compare.

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The absolute numbers aren't that different. You need 100s of MB just to display an empty Chrome window. Then the 66% is the difference excluding that baseline, e.g. it might be 300MB to load Chrome, then you measure 301MB vs 301.66MB. I guess that might be a bit misleading.

I think the electron memory usage comes down to the massive HTML spec and bloated old browser codebases. It's not JS. Node+V8 doesn't have nearly the memory usage of Chrome+V8.

That difference is what I'd be interested in anyway as a developer who focuses on PWAs (where the cost of chrome is paid for already). I'm trying to work out whether a WASM stack would help runtime performance, memory usage, and startup time, but based on these numbers it doesn't look so inspiring.

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