4 ms·

why? I don't have a problem with it, building extensions for VS Code is pretty easy Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach parity

scotty79 1y ago
Ease of writing and testing extensions is actually the cause why Electron won IDE wars. Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish. Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
Aurornis 1y ago
Complaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not a practical argument. The people who push these arguments don’t care that it actually runs very well on even below average developer laptops, they think it should have been written in something native.
- verdverm 1y ago
  same people pushing rust as "it's just faster" without considering the complexities that exist outside the language that impact performance?
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare. When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents. And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    I regularly run 6+ electron apps on a M2 Air and notice no slowdown 2x as many chrome instances, no issues
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Sure, 6 electron apps by themselves will eat some gigabytes and you won't notice the difference. If you didn't have those gigabytes of memory sitting idle, you would notice. Either ugly swapping behaviors or programs just dying. I use all my memory and can't add more, so electron causes me slowdowns regularly. Not constantly, but regularly, mostly when switching tasks.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. "Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a blank windows install has more than a hundred processes going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the computer if it was in all of them? > Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to have better computers just to run things like editors. The point of a beefy computer is to do things like compile. But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not developer tools. > The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me often. > You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right? Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set that does need to stay resident for them to be responsive.

scotty79 1y ago

Ease of writing and testing extensions is actually the cause why Electron won IDE wars. Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish. Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.

Aurornis 1y ago

Complaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not a practical argument. The people who push these arguments don’t care that it actually runs very well on even below average developer laptops, they think it should have been written in something native.

verdverm 1y ago
same people pushing rust as "it's just faster" without considering the complexities that exist outside the language that impact performance?
Dylan16807 1y ago
The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare. When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents. And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
- verdverm 1y ago
  I regularly run 6+ electron apps on a M2 Air and notice no slowdown 2x as many chrome instances, no issues
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Sure, 6 electron apps by themselves will eat some gigabytes and you won't notice the difference. If you didn't have those gigabytes of memory sitting idle, you would notice. Either ugly swapping behaviors or programs just dying. I use all my memory and can't add more, so electron causes me slowdowns regularly. Not constantly, but regularly, mostly when switching tasks.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise. Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. "Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a blank windows install has more than a hundred processes going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the computer if it was in all of them? > Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that. Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to have better computers just to run things like editors. The point of a beefy computer is to do things like compile. But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not developer tools. > The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly. I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me often. > You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right? Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set that does need to stay resident for them to be responsive.