DNA developers these days just use electron and don’t care about efficiency. That lungfish is ripe for a refactoring.

Bet I could implement a new lungfish with only a few million base pairs in a weekend.

640 kbp should be enough for anybody.

Is electron some sort of synthetic genome compiler?

To be specific, it is Javascript based desktop application platform. Each finished app ships its own version of Chrome which affects the size and arguably adds quite a lot of overhead. It also makes developing cross-platform desktop applications much more accessible, thus making it easier for more developers to make slow, unoptimized applications. Overall it has become a meme for bulky, slow desktop apps with Visual Studio Code being the notable exception.

It’s a (not well executed) joke about electron’s memory consumption and how developers refuse to use anything better.

> not well executed

Aw! :(

For the record I like Electron a lot and am usually the one to defend it on HN, but it indeed was a comment on binary size, needless duplication and copy-paste culture ;)

I think the joke may be about binary size and not memory, which would make sense when talking about DNA.