Comparing it to similar native app like pidgin it is still about 10 times more.

With 10 times the features, it’s not at all unreasonable.

That's also roughly what I see on Windows for my Electron app [0]. 0% idle CPU and about 200MB of RAM. That's large but acceptable compared with other non-Electron apps running, like Sublime Text (170MB) or Thunderbird (320 MB).

[0] https://imgur.com/tMhEwtp.png

You have some choice native apps - Sublime is Python, which is rather horrible with memory usage and Thunderbird essentially embeds a browser just like Electron apps.

Compare VSCode or Atom with Emacs or Gvim for something more native.

To pick some apps off my desktop right now:

- Emacs with a pile of extensions, 22 MB

- SpeedCrunch, 13 MB

- SumatraPDF, 19 MB

- MS Word, 101 MB

Uhh sublime is written in C++ with it's own custom UI the toolkit iirc. It only uses python for scripting.

In my list of applications that are always active, Firefox and ConEmu are also over 500MB too. The exception is Total Commander (amazingly, still compatible with Windows 3.1), which is only 20MB but it's more the exception than the rule.

Haven't been using it since ~ 2 years. My data might be out of date.