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Sibachian

@slightlyoff can we kill the hell spawn that is electron?

there is literally ONE major modern chat client today running natively, ALL others run electron - of which my macbook pro M1 16GB can't handle more than 2-3 of. nevermind everything else that now also runs electron, such as all modern game launchers and note apps.

I actually uninstalled all but 1 electron app yesterday (Joplin) because i'm done running at a crawl. It feels like my computer is now inadequate to do simple, modern, tasks.

4 Dec 2023 at 14:01 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
8 comments
Matt Campbell

@Beiz @slightlyoff I wonder how much of the weight of those Electron apps is actually due to running a separate Chromium engine per app, and how much is due to React or similar frameworks.

4 Dec 2023 at 14:16 | Open on toot.cafe
Sibachian

@matt @slightlyoff does it matter? electron exists solely as a lazy shortcut anyway and doesn't actually do anything that benefits the end user, only the developers (less effort, same pay, and to hell with anything else). electron is the digital answer to quantity over quality.

my intel m3 tablet hybrid can't even handle a single electron app without severely killing overall performance. but then again, neither can it do snaps or flatpaks without screeching to a halt, too.

4 Dec 2023 at 14:33 | Open on mastodon.social
Jernej Simončič �

@matt @Beiz @slightlyoff Just libcef.dll is between 150 and 200 MB (the newer the library, the larger it is); with Electron, either the executable is 100-200 MB, or you have a nw.dll with a similar size (and that's not counting other support files).

If I look at pgAdmin4 v7, the runtime directory is 333 MB, of this there's 6 MB in node_modules and about 2 MB in assets and postgres-related files, so around 320 MB is just Electron. My mail client has the CEF runtime in a separate directory which weights 278 MB.

I've got 17 programs that use CEF and 19 that are Electron-based currently installed (not counting browsers).

@matt @Beiz @slightlyoff Just libcef.dll is between 150 and 200 MB (the newer the library, the larger it is); with Electron, either the executable is 100-200 MB, or you have a nw.dll with a similar size (and that's not counting other support files).

If I look at pgAdmin4 v7, the runtime directory is 333 MB, of this there's 6 MB in node_modules and about 2 MB in assets and postgres-related files, so around 320 MB is just Electron. My mail client has the CEF runtime in a separate directory which weights 278 MB.

4 Dec 2023 at 14:54 | Open on infosec.exchange
Proxfox Virtual Environment 🦊

@Beiz @slightlyoff the electronification will stop when there is one. JUST ONE. cross platform UI framework that is at least on par with it in DX

4 Dec 2023 at 16:32 | Open on tech.lgbt
Sibachian
Proxfox Virtual Environment 🦊

@Beiz @slightlyoff as good a developer experience rust might be, it still can never compete with javascript's ease of use

also most of the complaints about electron come from memory/cpu usage, which tauri is only marginally better at. it still uses chromium

4 Dec 2023 at 18:47 | Open on tech.lgbt
Matt

@Beiz @slightlyoff what about visual studio code? It's very fast and responsive and is an electron app.

I think people are blaming the tools too much.

The real problem is that no one in the web world knows how to actually care about optimization. Things like how many server round trips you are making to load a page are just ignored

4 Dec 2023 at 22:24 | Open on hachyderm.io
Sibachian

@mattcrwi @slightlyoff i think you're just too used to the overall experience of electron.

it also helps to have a good computer, and only keep a few electron apps running on your system at any one time. to avoid a system wide slowdown and crashes.

5 Dec 2023 at 7:23 | Open on mastodon.social
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