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A comment on Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Desktop Apps?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by pavlov on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:42AM (#14245861)
Look at it from the computer owner's perspective. I don't want your experience if it comes with 100+ MB of redundant code.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by hashkb on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:46AM (#14245889)
Isn't that size arbitrary? Downloading and storing a 100mb program takes the same (or less) fraction of your available resources today as downloading and storing a 1mb program in 1995.

Are you short on disk space? Download is too slow? Is this a real problem?

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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by pavlov on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:49AM (#14245906)
Download size is relatively harmless; size on disk is an annoyance and a real concern (a lot of laptop users have an SSD in the 128-256 GB range); but memory footprint is the real killer for me. I don't want every little widget to consume hundreds of megs of memory.

In 1995 my computer had 8 or 16 MB memory... Having a 1 MB app running in the background would have been huge. I certainly don't want to go back to that era.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by Zak on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @09:24AM (#14246115)
Memory footprint is my big issue with this too. Related, I've noticed chat for various projects slowly migrating from IRC to Slack and have the same issue there. What could have been another irssi window taking up an insignificant amount of memory is now a 150Mb Chrome tab.

To make matters worse, memory growth has stagnated. A Macbook Pro today, to give an example has the same maximum RAM (16Gb) it did in 2010. That's zero memory growth in 7 years for a popular developer machine.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by hashkb on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:01AM (#14246355)
Wouldn't regular Chrome have the same issue? Each tab is a full instance... your argument is against Chrome and web apps, not Electron.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by pavlov on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:24AM (#14246567)
No, it's different.

Each Chrome tab is a process, but they share the same dynamic libraries in memory. Each Electron app is both a process and a separate copy of the dynamic libraries.

If you run half a dozen Electron apps, those redundant libraries will be taking up roughly a gigabyte already.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by rodorgas on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:12AM (#14246438)
Chrome splits itself in various processes and usually each tab has a process. But each process is not a full Chrome instance. There's a huge difference.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by MrBra on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @03:48PM (#14249911)
Would people give shit if Spotify was 100 Mb?
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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Deskto... by pavlov on Wednesday May 03, 2017 @03:57AM (#14253821)
if Spotify were the only app using Electron, it wouldn't matter.

But when every utility and menubar widget has its own copy of Electron, the footprint balloons quickly. And people are actually doing those kinds of apps in Electron already!

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