Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why

Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by therealmarv on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:09AM (#50413953)

I don't understand the hate on Electron. I think most people here never shipped cross plattform apps ever and even less maintained them across cross platform. It's a financial decision. Electron (in the age before AI) enabled to stand on the shoulders of giants to build a reliable product with one code-base among many OSes. Something which Java promised Electron really delivered for most end-user apps. Google poured billions into making the fundament of Electron fast and reliable. And it enabled many Linux ports of apps which would have otherwise not happened.

Best example is vscode.

Are Electron apps more wasteful than native: sure. But I rather stand with Electron and that Windows, Mac and Linux is supported.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by dijit on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:52AM (#50414289)

Sort of, you're right that it's zero sum.

But electron applications that are forced by the first party (IE; third party clients are explicitly forbidden and will be an EULA violation- possibly resulting in expulsion from the platform) is an issue.

We talk about a global RAM crisis now due to AI, but I don't even want to think about how much RAM is hoarded by Teams/Slack and Discord in aggregate- these are applications that are intended to be run in the background by everybody, so you're talking at least 2GiB per person because you can be pretty sure that people are running more than one of these.

1.5GiB * the number of people in work = what.. 1 petabyte of RAM? For chat.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by hedora on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:27AM (#50414632)

Is that really electron's fault though?

Compare vscode memory + cpu usage to whatever IDE you were using before that. It's probably an order of magnitude more efficient.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by dijit on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:43AM (#50414796)

VS code is not an IDE, its more similar to Sublime.

In comparison to Sublime, it is indeed slower and more resource inefficient- however, it is free and good enough.

Not everything boils down to technical purity, there can be other important factors.

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