> Is it just me or does anyone else feel that 200 MB is a lot for a native chat app written in Rust, that's essentially a remote interface for the WhatsApp on your phone?

> I remember back in the day, apps like Miranda IM (and early versions of Trillian) used only digits of RAM, even when you had multiple plugins talking several protocols at the same time

I think what's happening in the second one is that because you're using the native OS toolkits a bunch of stuff is shared, whereas with these "self-contained" "native"-y apps you end up having to load up the whole world and aren't sharing things with everything else

I'd love to be proven wrong but I feel like if you use e.g. Qt you're gonna have to hold onto a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't if you were "just" using OS-native stuff (though maybe that gets shared if you're using the exact same version? Is there something that can be done in this space?)

With Qt, on my KDE Linux, a simple app usually stays well below 60 to 100 MB.

As an additional data point, I recently vibed an egui wrapper around a library I wrote for mod management for a game, and testing it out now, it idles at 92 MB. This implies to me that at least half of the overhead is probably not from the gui framework, but I also don't know how much effort they spent trying to optimize it; I didn't try to optimize my vibed GUI app at all, but I did hand-write the library that it uses for file management, state tracking, etc., and I tend to go out of my way to try to avoid unnecessary allocation in my Rust code. I don't know how much of the memory usage is essentially required overhead or from other dependencies for non-GUI parts of the app, but my instinct is that there's probably a bit of optimization that can be done. I don't think it's crazy for them not to have spent the effort on trying to do that yet though (or potentially even at all, if it's efficient enough for their own personal use).

> Is it just me or does anyone else feel that 200 MB is a lot for a native chat app written in Rust ...

That was my first thought. But considering it as a significant improvement from > 1 GB, I guess it is what it is.

> I remember back in the day, apps like Miranda IM (and early versions of Trillian) used only digits of RAM ...

Sadly this was true for many apps.

Almost all of those 200MB will be system libraries for rendering and GPU buffers.

Hello world in Rust is huge, and every actual program I've looked at installed dozens of packages for basic functionality.

Turns out all those zero cost abstractions add up to a lot!

The number of packages doesn't have anything to do with this

It does with the compile times lol

Is there actually a way to see a breakdown of memory usage for a program? If you want to see where all the memory is going?

The topic was ran usage during runtime.

What causes that?

> Is there actually a way to see a breakdown of memory usage for a program? If you want to see where all the memory is going?

Flame graphs are a pretty common tool for this (maybe slightly less common than using them for seeing the breakdown of the time spent when running).

Looking forward to the 2030s when we get a wave of lightweight actually native software as an alternative to the bloated Rust rewrites ;)

[delayed]

"Claude, write me a client for WhatsApp in raw assembly"

yeah 200MB is nothing to boast about

I just checked with the native WhatsApp client on Windows 11: 650 MB of RAM as it is running, across all its processes. Thus, taking ≈⅓ of RAM is nothing to brag about for a reimplementation that focuses on being lean and fast. Also, "opens in under a second" – back in the days when SSDs where new, programs opened instantaneously (<60 ms)!

Lastly, I still have to be convinced that Rust is a good choice for GUI programs, considering their messy mutable state and ownership.

[delayed]