5 ms·

The performance really isn’t that bad at all in my experience. The complaints you see are developer complaints, where they’re talking about resource usage that

by jf- 8y ago

The performance really isn’t that bad at all in my experience. The complaints you see are developer complaints, where they’re talking about resource usage that ordinary users would never notice or question, or UI lag that most users wouldn’t care about (I only add this because someone else in this thread claims to have encountered it, but I never have, or have never noticed). If you find web apps running in chrome to be acceptably performant, then electron is fine for your use case. But naturally, a native solution will be faster if you’re doing something that really is resource intensive. VS Code is electron, I use VS Code every day without noticing any issues. I think the complaints about electron are moot.

weiming 8y ago
> where they’re talking about resource usage that ordinary users would never notice or question, or UI lag that most users wouldn’t care about But this is such poor logic. We can notice these things, while regular users just suffer not knowing why their battery drains so quickly, unable to pinpoint the problem.
- jf- 8y ago
  > But this is such poor logic. No, it’s not. It’s at most a trade-off. Some developers will doubtless make this their hill to die on, but I suspect it really has nothing to do with performance or battery life, and it’s likely motivated by resistance to web technologies being used on desktop vs what they’re used to. Also I’d like to see some actual battery life benchmarks for electron, because I don’t imagine that it’s a huge deal, but benchmarks would prove the matter. It also ignores actual desktop users or users who just use mains power all the time.
  - spiralganglion 8y ago
    If you’re on a Mac, open up activity monitor and watch which apps use the most energy. For me, the energy used by Atom, Slack, and Chrome is vastly higher than the energy used by other apps (inc. Safari loaded with tabs). It’s possible to make an energy efficient Electron app — you just need to aggressively shut off event loops when there’s nothing to update, which is hard so most app (and site) devs don’t bother. (I make complex animations on the web, so I’m hyper attuned to perf and energy use)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryacko 8y ago
      I’m curious, do you compile anything to asm.js?
      - spiralganglion 8y ago
        Not yet, though I'm keeping my eye on WASM and will pursue it if the need arises. The sort of work I do has relatively little overhead from the JS, and is mostly bottlenecked by rendering (SVG, mostly). WASM wouldn't help my load/parse times since I rarely ship more than a few Kb of JS, and it wouldn't help my per-frame times or latency because I'm usually done the JS part of the frame in around 1ms.
    - sroussey 8y ago
      That and check if the window is hidden, which was improved a bit in this release.
oscargrouch 8y ago
Take a look at the apps you are executing now. Now imagine if they were all electron based and therefore consuming 1GB+ each? Also we need to take into account that it feels slugish and they are not as responsive as other apps, and i guess it has to do with JS VM reaching the tipping point of what it can do and optmize.. Anyway, my main point is that the big problem will happen when you stack those things.. than a computer that should be more than enough, just isn't. Even the user with low tech awareness, will close the app and feel his computer is working better.. and they will blame the company who makes the app for making their computers feel slugish in the end.
- jf- 8y ago
  Except that they don’t need to consume 1gb+ and they don’t need to feel sluggish. We’re also not talking about replacing every native app with electron.
  - oscargrouch 8y ago
    > Except that they don’t need to consume 1gb+ and they don’t need to feel sluggish. The problem is that is built around V8 tied up to Node.js, so i cant see how it will get any better giving V8 is a state-of-the-art VM already very optimized and using little resources as possible. Also you are tied to blink/webkit which together with V8 will consume a good chunk of memory and you as a dev will be unable to optimize further, giving you can use anything other than JS and blink. > We’re also not talking about replacing every native app with electron. Of course not. But the problem here is the trend. Companies will see how cheap it is to just reuse cheaper human resources being used to the company web dev, and how fast you can prototype an app. The other companies who create better products because they care more, will have a hard time competing with the cheap sketchy software that cost less to build, and the worse products will likely win. Its "the worse is better" all over again.
    - jf- 8y ago
      > The other companies who create better products because they care more, will have a hard time competing with the cheap sketchy software that cost less to build, and the worse products will likely win. They’re not cheap sketchy products, you keep mischaracterising electron apps so that you have a point. Let the market decide. If the native apps are superior, then customers will choose them more often and companies will feel the pressure to use them. Unless of course customers don’t care, as I believe, then any argument about their superiority is meaningless.

by jf- 8y ago

weiming 8y ago

> where they’re talking about resource usage that ordinary users would never notice or question, or UI lag that most users wouldn’t care about But this is such poor logic. We can notice these things, while regular users just suffer not knowing why their battery drains so quickly, unable to pinpoint the problem.

jf- 8y ago
> But this is such poor logic. No, it’s not. It’s at most a trade-off. Some developers will doubtless make this their hill to die on, but I suspect it really has nothing to do with performance or battery life, and it’s likely motivated by resistance to web technologies being used on desktop vs what they’re used to. Also I’d like to see some actual battery life benchmarks for electron, because I don’t imagine that it’s a huge deal, but benchmarks would prove the matter. It also ignores actual desktop users or users who just use mains power all the time.
- spiralganglion 8y ago
  If you’re on a Mac, open up activity monitor and watch which apps use the most energy. For me, the energy used by Atom, Slack, and Chrome is vastly higher than the energy used by other apps (inc. Safari loaded with tabs). It’s possible to make an energy efficient Electron app — you just need to aggressively shut off event loops when there’s nothing to update, which is hard so most app (and site) devs don’t bother. (I make complex animations on the web, so I’m hyper attuned to perf and energy use)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryacko 8y ago
    I’m curious, do you compile anything to asm.js?
    - spiralganglion 8y ago
      Not yet, though I'm keeping my eye on WASM and will pursue it if the need arises. The sort of work I do has relatively little overhead from the JS, and is mostly bottlenecked by rendering (SVG, mostly). WASM wouldn't help my load/parse times since I rarely ship more than a few Kb of JS, and it wouldn't help my per-frame times or latency because I'm usually done the JS part of the frame in around 1ms.
  - sroussey 8y ago
    That and check if the window is hidden, which was improved a bit in this release.

oscargrouch 8y ago

Take a look at the apps you are executing now. Now imagine if they were all electron based and therefore consuming 1GB+ each? Also we need to take into account that it feels slugish and they are not as responsive as other apps, and i guess it has to do with JS VM reaching the tipping point of what it can do and optmize.. Anyway, my main point is that the big problem will happen when you stack those things.. than a computer that should be more than enough, just isn't. Even the user with low tech awareness, will close the app and feel his computer is working better.. and they will blame the company who makes the app for making their computers feel slugish in the end.

jf- 8y ago
Except that they don’t need to consume 1gb+ and they don’t need to feel sluggish. We’re also not talking about replacing every native app with electron.
- oscargrouch 8y ago
  > Except that they don’t need to consume 1gb+ and they don’t need to feel sluggish. The problem is that is built around V8 tied up to Node.js, so i cant see how it will get any better giving V8 is a state-of-the-art VM already very optimized and using little resources as possible. Also you are tied to blink/webkit which together with V8 will consume a good chunk of memory and you as a dev will be unable to optimize further, giving you can use anything other than JS and blink. > We’re also not talking about replacing every native app with electron. Of course not. But the problem here is the trend. Companies will see how cheap it is to just reuse cheaper human resources being used to the company web dev, and how fast you can prototype an app. The other companies who create better products because they care more, will have a hard time competing with the cheap sketchy software that cost less to build, and the worse products will likely win. Its "the worse is better" all over again.
  - jf- 8y ago
    > The other companies who create better products because they care more, will have a hard time competing with the cheap sketchy software that cost less to build, and the worse products will likely win. They’re not cheap sketchy products, you keep mischaracterising electron apps so that you have a point. Let the market decide. If the native apps are superior, then customers will choose them more often and companies will feel the pressure to use them. Unless of course customers don’t care, as I believe, then any argument about their superiority is meaningless.