3 ms·

Yes, Chrome is a memory hog, but that's nothing new. The thing is, Chrome still runs just fine on the laptops-of-old with 4 gigs of memory. I've always just ass

Yes, Chrome is a memory hog, but that's nothing new. The thing is, Chrome still runs just fine on the laptops-of-old with 4 gigs of memory. I've always just assumed that Chrome likes to use whatever memory it can find (which, for people with a lot of memory who only browse the web, is probably what they want). Acting like these Electron apps are un-useable without supercomputers is silly.

rcarmo 9y ago
Actually, each Electron app ships with its own version of Chromium, and if you have multiple apps running you will have multiple instances of _approximately_ the same runtime, but zero shared resources across apps - no shared executable segments, no shared RAM, nothing. So the bloat is actually bigger than running multiple instances of Chrome.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  Electron apps need to take the route that Eclipse used and uses. Eclipse is a resource intensive Java application (though it feels much better these days than when I first used it 12 or so years ago). One runtime, with a mechanism for installing new "views" and such. Some applications were delivered as complete Eclipse runtime downloads plus the custom additions, but usually you could just download those custom parts directly into your Eclipse runtime. That was a reasonably effective use of a common runtime and resource.
- rmrfrmrf 9y ago
  Sounds like these apps are built with security and portability in mind ;). Seriously, though, this seems like an implementation issue that can/will improve over time. I can see the case where, yeah, if your users care about what your stack looks like and they refuse to use Electron apps, then sure, use something else (same goes if your users are laptop-heavy users with concerns about battery life). Some devs don't have those constraints and that's where Electron can fit in.

3 ms·

Yes, Chrome is a memory hog, but that's nothing new. The thing is, Chrome still runs just fine on the laptops-of-old with 4 gigs of memory. I've always just ass

by rmrfrmrf 9y ago

rcarmo 9y ago
Actually, each Electron app ships with its own version of Chromium, and if you have multiple apps running you will have multiple instances of _approximately_ the same runtime, but zero shared resources across apps - no shared executable segments, no shared RAM, nothing. So the bloat is actually bigger than running multiple instances of Chrome.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  Electron apps need to take the route that Eclipse used and uses. Eclipse is a resource intensive Java application (though it feels much better these days than when I first used it 12 or so years ago). One runtime, with a mechanism for installing new "views" and such. Some applications were delivered as complete Eclipse runtime downloads plus the custom additions, but usually you could just download those custom parts directly into your Eclipse runtime. That was a reasonably effective use of a common runtime and resource.
- rmrfrmrf 9y ago
  Sounds like these apps are built with security and portability in mind ;). Seriously, though, this seems like an implementation issue that can/will improve over time. I can see the case where, yeah, if your users care about what your stack looks like and they refuse to use Electron apps, then sure, use something else (same goes if your users are laptop-heavy users with concerns about battery life). Some devs don't have those constraints and that's where Electron can fit in.