We have a huge Android market here, but they're all phones with very low storage and slow 3G connections, so the default way to get an 'app' out is a HTML5 progressive web app. And the companies here work hard to make things run fast and smooth on slow devices.
When I have 20-50 KB/s stable 3g, browsing the web is a bit slow, but most sites work pretty good. Also messenger aren't a problem.
But working below 20 KB/s is a pain.
After coming to Australia, everyone here treats +4mb websites as normal which was a real mind twister for me. Thankfully pagespeed has always been my concern regardless of network speeds due to my 'conditioning' years ago.
By dumping binaries, creating emacsclient, but mostly by waiting 25+ years for fast computers w/SSDs to come along?
I love emacs, but slow startup was a problem for multiple decades, IMO.
There's been articles on HN specifically about how slow VS Code is, particularly the one about rendering cursor blinking, and of course anything running on Electron will never compete work the likes of vim, &c.
However, as Electron apps go, I've found it noticeably faster and less resource intensive than any others. Slack in particular is comparatively terrible, as was Atom in the past (people have said it's improved but I've not felt the need to try it again recently)
So what I would like to know is wtf everyone is doing in these apps to create this CRAZY amount of resource hogging they keep bitching about? Or are they rockin chomebooks? Seriously? I want to know where all of this nonsense is coming from?
You're running a music player, a text editor (or IDE), and a chat client. I would expect reasonably that would use less memory. One point you could make is that even native application alternatives, ones that don't use Electron, would be bloated and I would have to agree. Visual Studio .NET is pretty darn slow/cumbersome itself.
That's not to say that there aren't decisions to reconsider about code size, resource formats, etc. but I think it's easy to forget how much more behaviour has moved into our default baseline assumptions.
In my very limited experience, this makes programming anything several times more complicated. Writing a document editor? Difficult. Writing a networked, multi-user document editor? As difficult as the last thing but with asynchrony and lots of new failure modes.
Microsoft Word, with a multi-page complicated document, is using 200mb.
Just because we _have_ the resources to allow applications to bloat doesn't mean we should be alright with it. Its a similar argument to electric versus ICE cars; just because gas is cheap doesn't mean we shouldn't support EVs. EVs are fundamentally better for the future.
If we focus on performance optimizing the apps we use, it opens up a wide range of new computing hardware. You make fun of chromebooks, but imagine how much more interesting your work would be if you could use a machine with that performance. Battery life would be substantially higher. The cost of the machine would be substantially lower. The only reason most people need massive performance beasts is because we've pushed abstraction hell and bad engineering practices, so all of our tools suck.
Docker is another offender in recent times. Its great if you're on Linux, but few people are. So on OSX, we need to run a VM, so there goes another gig of memory.
Your bar should not be, "Well, I don't see a slowdown." Many people still develop software on computers with only 8GB total RAM. Throw in a browser and one or two more applications and you're getting close to exhausting that.
Eventually you are going to exhaust your memory resources; using software with poor performance constraints is (in my opinion) inherently antagonistic to a development machine. That's not to say I'm against desktop JavaScript/HTML5 apps categorically, I just think they need much better optimization.
No idea why, it's only joining one team with under 20 people and ~5 channels.
But I agree, Atom and Slack are really useful to if they consume another 250mb of ram because "It's not optimal", let them use it.
I also run two java processes with 1gb predefined (well probably I could fine tune them to use 512mb). and one angular/cli which accounts for 800mb. plus my database which got 500mb aswell.
spotify on mac used way more than 500mb memory, the last time I used it and also had an extreme amount of i/o pressure. atom actually did use at least 500 mb memory as well, with just the c# plugin.
Its incompetence on behalf of Slack and Github, not the tech itself.
Are there examples for HTML5 apps that manage to have great performance? Are there inherent limits?