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Comment by Dwedit | Hacker News Reader

Now RAM use is the main reason to prefer native APIs over web views.

I am not sure WebViews are the actual problem, and fairly confident it is running the entire application + gargantuan frameworks as JavaScript is.

I am currently working on something I call HTMXNative, which is what it sounds like: using HTMX in WebViews for hybrid apps.

I haven't really looked much at memory consumption, but when I've looked so far it's been very comparable to equivalent apps using native UI.

The issue with JS is that each page gets its own execution context so they don’t share any memory. I am actually curious what does the WebView do to save on RAM here?

It doesn't have to "do" anything special if you just use it for rendering HTML, and not for running gargantuan layers of JS frameworks.

If you run gargantuan layers of JS frameworks in a WebView it will perform just as badly as a full browser. After all, a browser is (more or less) just a process wrapped around a WebView.

A decision to move native because of the crisis seems like an expensive populist move to please not very solvent users. Why bother with that if many predict the RAM crisis will last merely until 2027?

If you can predict the future so accurately, why aren't you the richest man on the planet?

I can't. But I'm sure I will be happier and richer person if I don't opt out self from a working stack in favor of saving 100-200mb RAM

You're off by an order of magnitude there.

super happier and super richer?

Because predicting the future roughly as well as everyone else doesn't make you rich.

Predicting a surge in RAM supply after a surge in RAM demand and a huge increase in RAM margins is economics 101.

We are still bound by natural resources, as much as economics 101 loves to ignore this simple fact.

Scarcity of natural resources is squarely within the realm of economics 101.

The open question in my mind is for how long semiconductor demand will continue to grow faster than we can increase production capacity.

Supply of RAM isn't really limited by natural resources - silicon is literally one of the most abundant materials on the planet. It's limited by the construction of billion dollar factories.

And yet if I open Activity Monitor right now: "Emoji & Symbols" is using 1GB of memory, "Spotlight" using 749MB, "Control Center" using 727MB, despite not having used any of the features recently (and additionally restricting Spotlight to index basically nothing or else it'll drain my battery). Each one of those is larger than any of the Electron apps I always have running (Claude, Cursor, Signal, 1Password).

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