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Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know

Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.

ActorNightly 1y ago
I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It was the indexing which was causing the resource utiliazation.
  - ActorNightly 1y ago
    For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU (maybe continuously indexing)
esafak 1y ago
Fortunately the next generation seems to be CLI based! Maybe we'll go back to native apps in the next generation.
rcleveng 1y ago
It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible. ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions. Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces) There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would work, I'm not sure if the performance would be substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es and web unfortunately. So we are where we are :)
- dgfitz 1y ago
  > It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible. Qt is pretty good at this actually. I don’t have a Mac, but building the same codebase for windows, linux, and a wasm target was pretty neat the first time I did it.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  >it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Not really. Electron is basically web browser. The issue is that a cornerstone of modern development is basically "don't rewrite what already has been written", however the problem is that you always get optimization creep because of this - people just build shit on top of other shit continuously and never go back and optimize.
WD-42 1y ago
Zed exists.
imtringued 1y ago
I genuinely thought we have enough RAM since the 16GB era. Nope, they figured out a way to consume it all plus a dozen of GB in swap.

Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.

ActorNightly 1y ago

I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It was the indexing which was causing the resource utiliazation.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU (maybe continuously indexing)

esafak 1y ago

Fortunately the next generation seems to be CLI based! Maybe we'll go back to native apps in the next generation.

rcleveng 1y ago

It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible. ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions. Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces) There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would work, I'm not sure if the performance would be substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es and web unfortunately. So we are where we are :)

dgfitz 1y ago
> It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible. Qt is pretty good at this actually. I don’t have a Mac, but building the same codebase for windows, linux, and a wasm target was pretty neat the first time I did it.
ActorNightly 1y ago
>it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Not really. Electron is basically web browser. The issue is that a cornerstone of modern development is basically "don't rewrite what already has been written", however the problem is that you always get optimization creep because of this - people just build shit on top of other shit continuously and never go back and optimize.

WD-42 1y ago

Zed exists.

imtringued 1y ago

I genuinely thought we have enough RAM since the 16GB era. Nope, they figured out a way to consume it all plus a dozen of GB in swap.