6 ms·
> VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish I see this mentioned quite often here, but that's not a valid argument in favour of Electron Apps. V
by jeswin 6y ago
> VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish
I see this mentioned quite often here, but that's not a valid argument in favour of Electron Apps.
VSCode is the primary focus for a user when it's active - so it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources. Now if a bunch of background taskbar apps, calculators and notepads start doing the same, user experience is going to go downhill very quickly.
So basically, Electron is a good choice for apps in which you spend a lot of time; and a poor choice to be a preferred platform for an OS.
- space_ghost 6y agoThe impact could reduced if a single Electron runtime is shared across apps. Imagine the various HTML5 mobile phone environments, like Palm's webOS, but in a desktop setting.
- zelon88 6y agoSince electron is basically a headless browser, you would be opening up any app with an XSS vulnerability to any other app running in the runtime.
- scaladev 6y agoHeadless? It even has the same debug console as the ordinary Chromium. Basically the only thing it misses is the URL bar and navigation buttons. It's just a browser with some OS integration slapped on the side.
- chasd00 6y agoTrue, I’ve always thought of electron as phonegap/Cordova for desktops.
- oshanz 6y agoSo it needs a isolation like firefox containers
- aserafini 6y agoYes, we could have tabs to switch between different applications running on that shared runtime. And a universal way of accessing any published application for that runtime through some kind of address bar.
- afavour 6y agoThat's essentially what a Progressive Web App is.
- cassepipe 6y agoI just bought an Onivim license cause I wanted to treat myself and they're using Revery as an Electron replacement. Not sure I understand why it is faster, but I have to say the startup time is almost instantataneous and it's really responsive on a Linux 2014 i5 4Go laptop (whereas VScode ...). So it might be a good alternative.
- imbnwa 6y agoHow is Onivim? I played aroud with it v1 but wasn't impressed enough to gamble money that they'd made breakthroughs in v2
- cassepipe 6y agoI have only used it for one day so far. I have a hard time quitting my customized terminal vim so I haven't looked much how to configure it. The only thing I can say so far is that it's beautiful, works out of the box and it is really fast and responsive.
- thiht 6y ago> it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources I currently run 2 VScode instances and they literally total 70 MB. So no, it's not significant, on the contrary actually. And to be fair, even if it was 700 MB, I wouldn't care. Even older machines have at least 4 GB memory.
- keb_ 6y agoI'm always puzzled by these kinds of retorts. It's wonderful that you've never experienced performance or resourcing issues with Electron apps. But just because you haven't, doesn't mean other people don't. For the record, VSCode chugs like a MF on my Thinkpad running XFCE with 4gb of RAM. Meanwhile, Sublime Text flies
- thiht 6y agoI'm not talking about Electron apps but about VSCode specifically. I just cannot reproduce high RAM usage with it on any machine. Slack in comparison sucks bad for example, but reports of high memory usage for VSCode sound like fakes from non-users/haters.
- wetpaws 6y agoSublime Text has been consistently slower for me than VSCode.
- jiofih 6y agoThat’s simply not possible unless you mangled it with a broken extension. Sublime has its own native rendered with much, much lower latency.
- jiofih 6y agoYou’re not looking at the right processes. The real work happens in “VS Code helper” child processes which take at least 500MB total, usually more. That memory is not sitting idle either, it means your CPU is churning a lot more, and its not nice when you realize your code editor is using 20%.