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Is it a good number for Electron apps? Is it ok nowadays? 150MB seems too much for me. I also thought that by using Electron an app would be readily portable bu

Is it a good number for Electron apps? Is it ok nowadays? 150MB seems too much for me. I also thought that by using Electron an app would be readily portable but I could only find Mac binaries.

ronsor 8y ago
150MB is really good for an Electron app
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  yep - that's pretty minimal - about what I get when I'm just starting off with a skeletal electron app. for refernce, on win 10: whatsapp - 200+mb and 4 processes. slack - 325mb and 5 processes.
- devcpp 8y ago
  Oh my God I thought he was kidding. How did it get to this? And how do we solve this?...
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Don't use Electron apps?
  - arcticwombat 8y ago
    How did it get go this? Well that's what you get when the "solution" is to embed a webserver, a browser, a native executable to show that browser, and the server runs Node... The solution is simple, stop shoving square pegs in round holes, and learn an appropriate language rather than shoehorn JS everywhere.
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      > learn an appropriate language rather than shoehorn JS everywhere. Being that this app's sole purpose is to evaluate JS, this may be a situation where JS isn't being shoehorned
      - arcticwombat 8y ago
        By the looks of it, only the console (Or equivalent) is used for output, so bundling an entire browser seems way overkill for the output. There's plenty of ide-libraries in other languages to replace the one used by runjs.
        bdcravens 8y ago
        You'd still have to bundle a JS engine. Presumably you could build a traditional UI app and include V8, but I still think this isn't a bad use case for Electron (but I agree there are many apps where it isn't the best choice)
        arcticwombat 8y ago
        I'd imagine that the browser is the resource-heavy part of the application, Nodejs doesn't use hundreds of mb's of RAM in my experience, at least not while doing very little background work. To me it would make sense to build a real desktop application and bundle whatever JS engine you want to use, pipe and process the output as any other application. You'd end up with a much smaller application (Download size), more resource-efficient, and less reliance on things like the bundled browser.
        qudat 8y ago
        > You'd end up with a much smaller application (Download size), more resource-efficient, and less reliance on things like the bundled browser. None of these things I care about. I care about whether or not it serves a purpose to me. If it does, I'll use it. If it doesn't, I won't. You might have other priorities and that's your prerogative.
  - available 8y ago
    Electron is one of the reasons apps like this even gets made in the first place, other options are often not worth the time of development. A solution to reduce the size could be to ship the Electron runtime similar to .NET, etc. However, PWA's are probably going to be the best bet going forward.
  - leeman2016 8y ago
    Could something like Android webview work? The webview doesn't force each app to include a whole browser. So, maybe single instance of electron runtime with multiple thin apps with "electron-webviews".

Is it a good number for Electron apps? Is it ok nowadays? 150MB seems too much for me. I also thought that by using Electron an app would be readily portable but I could only find Mac binaries.

ronsor 8y ago

150MB is really good for an Electron app

andyidsinga 8y ago
yep - that's pretty minimal - about what I get when I'm just starting off with a skeletal electron app. for refernce, on win 10: whatsapp - 200+mb and 4 processes. slack - 325mb and 5 processes.
devcpp 8y ago
Oh my God I thought he was kidding. How did it get to this? And how do we solve this?...
- coldtea 8y ago
  Don't use Electron apps?
- arcticwombat 8y ago
  How did it get go this? Well that's what you get when the "solution" is to embed a webserver, a browser, a native executable to show that browser, and the server runs Node... The solution is simple, stop shoving square pegs in round holes, and learn an appropriate language rather than shoehorn JS everywhere.
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    > learn an appropriate language rather than shoehorn JS everywhere. Being that this app's sole purpose is to evaluate JS, this may be a situation where JS isn't being shoehorned
    - arcticwombat 8y ago
      By the looks of it, only the console (Or equivalent) is used for output, so bundling an entire browser seems way overkill for the output. There's plenty of ide-libraries in other languages to replace the one used by runjs.
      - bdcravens 8y ago
        You'd still have to bundle a JS engine. Presumably you could build a traditional UI app and include V8, but I still think this isn't a bad use case for Electron (but I agree there are many apps where it isn't the best choice)
        arcticwombat 8y ago
        I'd imagine that the browser is the resource-heavy part of the application, Nodejs doesn't use hundreds of mb's of RAM in my experience, at least not while doing very little background work. To me it would make sense to build a real desktop application and bundle whatever JS engine you want to use, pipe and process the output as any other application. You'd end up with a much smaller application (Download size), more resource-efficient, and less reliance on things like the bundled browser.
        qudat 8y ago
        > You'd end up with a much smaller application (Download size), more resource-efficient, and less reliance on things like the bundled browser. None of these things I care about. I care about whether or not it serves a purpose to me. If it does, I'll use it. If it doesn't, I won't. You might have other priorities and that's your prerogative.
- available 8y ago
  Electron is one of the reasons apps like this even gets made in the first place, other options are often not worth the time of development. A solution to reduce the size could be to ship the Electron runtime similar to .NET, etc. However, PWA's are probably going to be the best bet going forward.
- leeman2016 8y ago
  Could something like Android webview work? The webview doesn't force each app to include a whole browser. So, maybe single instance of electron runtime with multiple thin apps with "electron-webviews".