Electron is kind of the cause. You can program lean in Electron (see VSCode), but realistically the people that program JavaScript/TypeScript are usually not your CS pros. It's a language that everyone can get into easily, attracting very subpar developers as a result.

So it's not Electron, but it's what Electron enables.

Electron has its place, which is allowing web developers to make 'native' apps without learning new technology. When you are downloading any free software built on Electron, realize that it likely started as a labor of love that the person decided to open source or make available for free.

That said, large companies using Electron is what I don't get. You can't expect me to believe Slack doesn't have the resources to create an actual app for their product.

It's not that they don't have the resources, but if you want to create something that works the same on Mac, Windows and Linux it might even be a good decision for a bigger company.

Also they might have started in electron and now it's hard to move away from it.

Sure, there's a very low barrier to entry, but node has a big hurtle in the middle.

You can relate if you ever had to setup a JS taskrunner/webpack from scratch. If you don't do it regularly, expect to spend 2-3 hours going through documentation and lots of outdated StackOverflow posts.

JS is easy as long as you stay within the constraints of whatever scaffolding you're using, if you need anything outside of that or need to upgrade your stack you need to know a lot of little things. "Best practices" move fast in JS, and projects die fast too.

What I'm trying to say is that the low barrier to entry causes a lot of bad software engineering. Of course tooling issues can be hard to solve and you can do beautiful programs in every language. It's just far more likely that if you pick a JS developer at random they won't know much about memory allocation, which algorithm to use, profiling, and on general clean code.

Even VS Code is slower and uses much more memory than native apps.

True, on my machine it uses 150MB of my RAM. It's a lot compared to native apps, but it's really at the point where it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Our companies customized eclipse on the other hand hogs 8GB ram when doing nothing, needs 2 minutes to start, and is sluggish in general. It's our course written in Java, which is much closer to native than electron, but still they wasted resources everywhere they could.

You can't run a compile on a 8GB ram machine, it will start swapping to hard disk.

Sublime doesn't have all the features, notepad ++ neither, and I just don't like vim style editing.

That leaves vscode.

And here I am, using nmh and exmh under CWM. With vimb + a host file, or plain Links+. IRSSI + Bitlbee for the rest. XMP to play some inspiring tunes. I only use 1.20G of RAM while using cached I/O . That minus the cache, is 185MB, according to vmstat.

You’re lucky. I could run so lean if I didn’t need to read emails using outlook and use Skype for business + slack for communicating with colleagues.

I’ve tried replacing slack with the wee-slack plugin for weechat but, while it works it’s far from a fully working solution and I still need to spin up a slack client sometimes.

Can't you use Thunderbird + Lightning? The RAM usage may be less.