While working on a project that uses a service built in Typescript I've been using vscode. I was wondering what was wrong with my laptop's battery, it had gone from lasting around 2-3 hours unplugged doing reasonably intensive to lasting around 40 minutes. As soon as I stopped using vscode the battery life went back to what I'd normally expect. It's honestly outrageous that applications built on Electron strangle your CPU to this extent. I'm not sure if vscode is particularly resource expensive compared to other Electron apps, but compared to other editors it's just ridiculous.

This is the bigger thing for me. The CPU usage of many electron apps is through the roof. It's so convenient to use that I'll probably still make electron apps, but I'd love to see Apple and Microsoft partner with each to make both more performant.

I have been very happy developing a typescript project for work in nvim and coc.nvim.

These numbers are too low. I assume that this task manager might show only private pages and not account shared pages with code (and the code size in Chrome is close to 100 Mb). Anyway, the number looks a bit unrealistic. Or maybe it doesn't count swap.

I used Electron apps on Linux and typically memory usage doesn't get below 250-500 Mb.

Here is an example for Skype: 220 Mb of swap + 388 Mb of PSS (Proportional set size).

Even that's low. Here's my result of running pmap on an open vscode process. "total 1046516K"

Yikes.

I would rather use smem, that calculates PSS (Potential Set Size) that properly accounts for pages shared between processes and shows swap usage per process. 1 Gb seems realistic though.

I manage to get these numbers with Sublime Text on a big project. Sublime Text is native.

It is partly written in Python, as well as plugins.

But it's not written in Electron, which is my point.

The memory usage issue is insane. My work laptop is regularly at 20GB memory usage partly because all of these electron apps take up 300mb to sit in the background and show me a notification every now and then. Its hugely refreshing to see my notes app (Zim Wiki) using 19mb of ram while being super fast and providing a huge amount of utility.

Also interesting to note that this relatively super-fast app is written in Python.

As a user I think Electron is great. It means many more apps have a Mac version. Compare to games, where Electron typically isn’t feasible, and observe how many games don’t have a Mac version. A little extra memory usage is fine by me. I can understand how people disagree, and that’s fine, just don’t use Electron apps. No need to ban them from the platform.

Yes, this is the thing.

The option isn't electron vs native, it's electron vs nothing.

Often, nothing is better than the Electron equivalent.

Case in point, if I run Slack in Safari, it runs better than the electron version. Functionally, it’s identical, except the scrolling is now native and feels a bit better integrated in macOS. So what’s the point?

I work on AVs, so we have incredibly beefy workstations: I've never managed to make my workstation seize up, even when building and running the full AV stack. Somehow, all of my coworkers who use native Slack have developed the reflex of killing and restarting the application whenever their workstation hangs. It's beyond me why they continue to use it.

(That isn't to say that the web version of Slack isn't horribly engineered too, but it poses far less of a problem)

There is literally no reason to distribute an electron app when you could simply run it as a web server using `npm start` and navigate to `http://localhost:[port number]`. Electron is born out of a misplaced notion that some apps are "special" and deserve a certain extra percentage of the users' CPU cycles and battery life for a spot in a user's system tray. 10% of a user's battery life multiplied by all their electron apps is not worth it when alternatives (like starting a web server and launching the users' preferred browser) exist.

I once used this pattern and implemented the webserver using C++. It was quite interesting that I could read gigabytes worth of files and run a sqlite database in the same process and still not exceed 3MB of RAM. Of course the tab in the browser used a lot more RAM (maybe 25MB) but browsers can suspend or simply close tabs. With regular applications the GUI would always be loaded in memory.

The reason why this pattern isn't used more commonly is the fact that right now web browsers simply aren't designed to be used this way unless you start a new instance for just a single app. The second reason is that electron developers are lazy. They only want to test a single browser (or browser version) and are perfectly happy that this means Google can get away with shady things.

I once used this pattern and implemented the webserver using C++. It was quite interesting that I could read gigabytes worth of files and run a sqlite database in the same process and still not exceed 3MB of RAM. Of course the tab in the browser used a lot more RAM (maybe 25MB) but browsers can suspend or simply close tabs. With regular applications the GUI would always be loaded in memory.

The option is native vs. electron vs. a regular web app. There's rarely any reason you need your web app to live in a dedicated Chrome instance without a URL bar.

Most decent apps build fine on BSD, electron is for closed crap with bad GUIs.

>Why the dislike, you ask?

Nobody is asking that, there's a crowd in here that restates the same three points about memory, performance and native UI about once a week.

I dislike waste, I have written assembly code for tiny processors. And yet, I run several Electron apps on my 8gb 2013 Macbook Air and it runs fine, especially VSCode. I am picking that over my previous choice which was native (vim), because I think it's better.

Not every developer runs a Macbook. Like many others for my laptop I use Linux running on a cheap ThinkPad with a quarter of the specs of the one you mentioned. ( I could afford to buy an overpriced Macbook, but I like my rugged $100 ThinkPad. ) As I stated elsewhere in this thread, vscode absolutely chews up my battery power. That's a practical concern. If I run several Electron apps on my laptop I'd be lucky to get an entire commute's worth of battery life out of it.

As someone who spent years complaining about the lack of cross-platform apps that I could run on Linux, I'm grateful everyday for Electron and for MS for using it for VS.Code.

The fact that it works the same on OSX and Linux is even better.

Linux wasn't exactly lacking in text editors, though.

> there's a crowd in here that restates the same three points about memory, performance and native UI about once a week.

Where else would users complain about undesirable developer trends if not on a developers' community?

You are right and I am sorry, that was unnecessary.

For the record, I do think there are problems with Electron, just not the ones usually mentioned. A big (huge!) problem in my opinion is that two windows can't share JS context. It's the reason why VSCode is way behind in multi-monitor support for instance.

This drives me crazy with Slack. In 2019 I can't have two chats open at once? Madness.

Not everyone is in your boat. As developers, we build things for others to use; empathy is a cornerstone of the job description. Hopefully this will help illustrate why Electron isn't a good choice:

Say a somewhat below-average user has 6GB of memory (I'm being generous here; plenty don't have more than 4GB). Today is a worse-than-usual day, and 4GB are taken by everything that isn't Electron because 40 tabs are open for a research paper due tomorrow. That leaves three gigs to spare. Now the user starts up some Electron apps.

- Music player? +400mb

- Note-taking? +300mb

- Messaging? +500mb (thanks, Slack!)

- News? +300mb

- Editor/IDE? +500mb

That's it. No more space. And that's before we even begin talking about what we're putting that dual-core CPU through. Battery life is a joke at this point.

A comparison: My OS, window manager, mail client, password manager, taskbar, music player (mpd+ncmpp+clerk.pl), file manager, system monitor, RSS reader, podcast player, IRC client, and editor/IDE (neovim+language servers with diagnostics, gotos, floating documentation, and refactoring all running) barely use over 1GB of memory, combined. Let that sink in. Essentially, a single electron app using 500mb of memory would increase my memory usage by 40%.

People shouldn't have to throw away/upgrade their computers every four years. I'm still rocking a 2013 HP Elitebook G1 with a Haswell i5 as my secondary machine. It runs just as well as my desktop for anything except heavy websites with JS enabled, compiling, and graphics-intensive work. I plan to either continue using it for another few years or donate it and switch to a more lightweight \$199 Pinebook Pro. Using less powerful hardware forces me to empathize with users who are using tech from the past rather than the future, because that's my job. I build tools for people besides myself to use.

If you must use the web, consider making your "app" start a local web server and launching the users' preferred browser for a more lightweight solution.

> why, as a user, should I pick an Electron app over native alternatives?

I'd pick the native version every time, but there is no native VSCode, Atom, Slack, or Whatsapp.

I use Sublime because it's native and I don't use too many plugins but a lot of people prefer VSCode.

Of course, Apple does not usually reject Mac App Store applications for RAM usage (and they're not doing it here).

On Windows, Slack.exe would sometimes eat up so much memory that I'd run out entirely. I upgraded to 64GB of RAM so I could keep it open for work.

What a ridiculous question... why would you not want the option to download Electron apps through the app store?

Not owning an iPhone, I don't have a horse in the race, but if company X is going to make a client for their service, and for whatever reason you need to use their client, if they are not allowed to use Electron, then they will use a different toolkit. If you don't like Electron apps, then this is a win for you personally. Too many services can only be accessed with the official app, which means it's not like you can just download the "not made with electron" version.

I just wish that Electron apps had a warning label applied so I won't accidentally download them.

I uh...Sorry are you mad that an electron application is using ~80mb more than other native applications?

I cannot fathom the indignity required to care about that difference.

> "I cannot fathom the indignity required to care about that difference."

Your failure to empathize seems like an odd thing to brag about. Even if you have plenty of memory available, you should be capable of empathizing with people who are short on it.

Taking more to do less. Can you fathom the ability to read the rest of that comment and all the other comments about it?

We used to joke about EMACS being Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

We still do, but now it has more of a Dr. Evil vibe. “Eight million bytes.”

lol. The communities were a bit more close knit with editors back then, so you couldn't avoid hearing such things. Nowadays there are so many choices that I hadn't heard the joke in a long time.

I'm glad that it still exists