3 ms·

On my work computer: Teams, an electron app, uses 600+ MB of RAM. Slack, another electron app, uses 250+ MB of RAM. Outlook (not electron) 180 MB of RAM. (Stil

by loph 4y ago

On my work computer: Teams, an electron app, uses 600+ MB of RAM. Slack, another electron app, uses 250+ MB of RAM. Outlook (not electron) 180 MB of RAM. (Still a pig) PowerPoint (not electron) 70 MB. Excel (not electron) 25 MB. Gnu Emacs: 3 MB. Adobe Photoshop: 50 +/- MB. A simple windows SDK program (all C) 1.4 MB. A tiny windows SDK program, all C: 0.5 MB of RAM This is just RAM usage. For CPU load and overall performance the native apps win. Emacs startup time blows away VS code. The question is valid. Why do we create modern desktop apps using HTML/CSS/JS? Electron apps are only good if you sell hardware.

wvenable 4y ago
> Emacs startup time blows away VS code. I have a pretty old desktop (so due for an upgrade) and VSCode starts up fast enough that I don't think about it. I'm sure Emacs starts up faster but would I even notice?
radley 4y ago
Apps built 30 years ago use less RAM because they had less RAM available: 16MB (1993) vs 16GB (2023). Back then, PowerPoint & other apps were considered to be the bloated apps. Worth considering: how often do you actually use those old apps?
- palata 4y ago
  Still Teams and Slack are roughly doing what IRC does. Just using infinitely more resources. Modern tech stack makes it cheaper to produce software, in a world where consumer don't give a shit and happily buy new hardware to run the worse software.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
selfmodruntime 4y ago
Note that while electron is pretty bad in that regard, it’s just that way because the entire chromium runtime ships with it. A leaner alternative could exist
- airstrike 4y ago
  Leaner alternatives do exist. Neutralino is one of them
deafpolygon 4y ago
> Emacs startup time blows away VS code. Nah. Spacemacs take 5-10 secs to load on my PC, vs a fraction of a second for VS Code. It's faster on Linux, but I run Windows out of necessity.

by loph 4y ago

wvenable 4y ago

> Emacs startup time blows away VS code. I have a pretty old desktop (so due for an upgrade) and VSCode starts up fast enough that I don't think about it. I'm sure Emacs starts up faster but would I even notice?

radley 4y ago

Apps built 30 years ago use less RAM because they had less RAM available: 16MB (1993) vs 16GB (2023). Back then, PowerPoint & other apps were considered to be the bloated apps. Worth considering: how often do you actually use those old apps?

palata 4y ago
Still Teams and Slack are roughly doing what IRC does. Just using infinitely more resources. Modern tech stack makes it cheaper to produce software, in a world where consumer don't give a shit and happily buy new hardware to run the worse software.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

selfmodruntime 4y ago

Note that while electron is pretty bad in that regard, it’s just that way because the entire chromium runtime ships with it. A leaner alternative could exist

airstrike 4y ago
Leaner alternatives do exist. Neutralino is one of them

deafpolygon 4y ago

> Emacs startup time blows away VS code. Nah. Spacemacs take 5-10 secs to load on my PC, vs a fraction of a second for VS Code. It's faster on Linux, but I run Windows out of necessity.