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The last point is something that in theory could have been achieved (shared runtime) with Java or .NET, but in reality there are real, tangible benefits to ship

The last point is something that in theory could have been achieved (shared runtime) with Java or .NET, but in reality there are real, tangible benefits to shipping self-contained applications, and the disk size argument is just no longer that relevant. This is in no way an endorsement for Electron, just an aspect common to all platforms that rely on an intermediate runtime that could in principle be shared.

realusername 8y ago
> the disk size argument is just no longer that relevant. But the memory one definitely is, I don't want each app to take 1GB of ram.
fredley 8y ago
Disk size argument no but memory yes. Keeping this massive binary duplicated in memory for every trivially small (memory-wise) app, like Slack, is bananas.
wodenokoto 8y ago
Actually disk size argument is still relevant. My brand new MacBook pro has the same disk space as my 10 year old MacBook pro. While hard drive space is cheap on spinning drives, space on consumer devices has stagnated or even decreased with the move to ssd
- rubber_duck 8y ago
  We are still talking ~100MB (from what I can see my entire VS Code install folder is 170 mb - 100 probably goes off to chromium stuff) - even if you use 10 electron apps 1GB of memory isn't going to kill your drive - really not worth the tradeoff and effort considering the alternatives.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> there are real, tangible benefits to shipping self-contained applications Here's one that doesn't suck: https://sqlitestudio.pl/ https://sqlitestudio.pl/ Maybe that was very complicated to make, all I know is that it's blazing fast and doesn't hog memory. Or hey, take OggDrop and LameDrop, I'm sure there's programs that do the same, are 100 times as big and have 3 options. I don't know if there are 10x programmers, but I know there are 100000x programs, with not one electron app among them.
- kimmel 8y ago
  I love SQLiteStudio. On my machine it starts up in < 2s. Version 3.2.1 takes 99MB disk space and is built against QT5. I just ran some queries and the memory usage is only 80MB for a not too large database. Another self-contained application I like is racket/drracket.

realusername 8y ago

> the disk size argument is just no longer that relevant. But the memory one definitely is, I don't want each app to take 1GB of ram.

fredley 8y ago

Disk size argument no but memory yes. Keeping this massive binary duplicated in memory for every trivially small (memory-wise) app, like Slack, is bananas.

wodenokoto 8y ago

Actually disk size argument is still relevant. My brand new MacBook pro has the same disk space as my 10 year old MacBook pro. While hard drive space is cheap on spinning drives, space on consumer devices has stagnated or even decreased with the move to ssd

rubber_duck 8y ago
We are still talking ~100MB (from what I can see my entire VS Code install folder is 170 mb - 100 probably goes off to chromium stuff) - even if you use 10 electron apps 1GB of memory isn't going to kill your drive - really not worth the tradeoff and effort considering the alternatives.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> there are real, tangible benefits to shipping self-contained applications Here's one that doesn't suck: https://sqlitestudio.pl/ https://sqlitestudio.pl/ Maybe that was very complicated to make, all I know is that it's blazing fast and doesn't hog memory. Or hey, take OggDrop and LameDrop, I'm sure there's programs that do the same, are 100 times as big and have 3 options. I don't know if there are 10x programmers, but I know there are 100000x programs, with not one electron app among them.

kimmel 8y ago
I love SQLiteStudio. On my machine it starts up in < 2s. Version 3.2.1 takes 99MB disk space and is built against QT5. I just ran some queries and the memory usage is only 80MB for a not too large database. Another self-contained application I like is racket/drracket.