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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop slack to compile…

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The bug in Slack is that it uses Electron

Electron has been a blessing and a horrible thing at the same time.

The overhead added by Electron is hardly that significant at this point, you can still use it to write significantly more efficient apps

The overhead of an entire browser engine isn’t significant compared to a native app?

No, compared to everything else in those apps. i.e. if they are writing extremely bloated Electron apps why would the native version be less slow and bloated? I mean Electron's overhead is mostly fixed (it's still a lot but its possible to keep memory usage we below 1 GB or even 500 BB even for more complex applications).

A native app that compiles to machine language and uses shared system libraries is by definition going to take less memory and resources than code + web browser +Javascript VM + memory to keep JITd byte code.

Write a “Hello World” in C++ that pops up a dialog box compared to writing the same as an Electron app.

This is not what "by definition" means.

A - your code

B - a heavy runtime that is greater than 0

C - system libraries

By definition

A + C < A + B + C

Again, this is not by definition. This is by deduction.

Yes, exactly, that's what I said. There is significant overhead but is it the only or the main reason why these apps are so slow and inefficient? It's perfectly easy to write slow and inefficient code in C++ as well...

Exactly how would you write a program in C that could possibly be as bloated as adding an entire browser engine + Javacript runtime?

A highly inefficient render loop. I've seen people commit absolute crimes rendering text in game engines.

It's always good to not slack when compiling.

Just to clarify for other readers, sword fighting while riding office chairs is not slacking.

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