Last time I tried building a 'blank' node-webkit app for OS X (using https://github.com/Dica-Developer/generator-node-webkit), the resulting .app came to ~100MB.
Does anyone know the base size for an atom-shell app?
Does anyone know the base size for an atom-shell app?
The alternative is not making apps self-contained, but instead to make them rely on shared libraries. This is much more efficient, but apart from a few neckbeards who cry "bloat" it seems that most people care more about avoiding dependency hell and ease of use, even if that means large packages due to library duplication.
You mean as a developer. Your average 'user' does not know or care how big an app 'should' be.
A significant number of users would notice an app being dramatically larger than it ought to be. I've seen a lot of reviews like "why the hell this app over 100mb??!!1". There is a huge spectrum of technical competence between "I don't have any sense of what a megabyte is" and "Developer".
Besides, does it matter much if you delete an app when it can be downloaded again in a matter of minutes?
I just launched it and timed it at 28 seconds. Then I closed it and launched it again and it took 3 seconds, so I assume there's some sort of caching going on. But basically Atom is too slow and bloated for what I need it for, which is just editing text files, CSV files, XML files etc. Sometimes I really need the multi-line cursors for a CSV though, and I'll use ST2 for that, as it seems a little snappier than Atom, although it also takes a little while to start up.
When I write code, I use Eclipse if it's Java (for work) or emacs for everything else (personal projects). I think I'm just going to install emacs on my work machine and start using it for all my text editing needs though.
It reminds me of Newton's third law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."