That's part of the problem. Electron apps are unavoidably heavy - huge binaries and 250MB-300MB+ memory consumed regardless of the task at hand. A simple "hello world" in electron without an ounce of JS or CSS will exhibit these traits.

Chat is a very simple sort of application. We've been doing it for decades now and have had functionality that approaches that of hangouts that works perfectly on machines with tens and hundreds of times less power and resources available. There's barely an excuse for such a program to consume more than 50MB of RAM, let alone 300MB+.

Some may argue that "unused RAM is wasted RAM," but I'd argue that this statement holds true only if the RAM that would be used is needed for actual functionality. If it's baseline requirement for the program to run at all, something is wrong unless the program is monstrous in nature (think AutoCAD, Maya, etc).

Maybe these competent developers don't realize that lots of users don't care if their app use 100-200mo on an 8Go laptop. Nor do they realize that memory usage is one indicator among a few others that are as or more relevant to the various contexts: productivity, talent pool, cost, maintenance, etc. Trade-offs have to be made, Electron is one.

Some posters seem to think that, because you CAN build a chat app consuming a few megabytes of RAM, it means you should and it's practical. It's like pointing to 64KB demoscene games and saying "see, you can write a game in 64KB, why does this one take multiple gigabytes".

Well, by all means, create a Slack competitor in hand-optimized assembly if you wish. Or whatever else you prefer (Rust?). If it's a better product, it may take over market share. Assuming your users even care about that. Hint: most are not obsessing over TOP, Activity Monitor, or whatever your OS uses.

Otherwise, don't whine. Electron makes it possible to create and ship apps very very quickly. Apps which would not exist otherwise. Every time you remove a barrier, you open up doors for more people.

While spinning up an entire browser for a single app has memory usage implications – namely, the baseline consumption is high, as is download size – the biggest issue is that it is easy to be wasteful when using web technologies. Look at Visual Studio Code, for instance. It's light and nimble compared to alternatives. It's true that a single one of its workers consume as much memory as a whole Emacs instance, but the development pace is staggering. And it still uses less memory than Slack...

Just checked discord - electron app consumes half the memory firefox does with only discord open.

So "the downsides of Electron outweigh the downsides of native apps" when you're someone who patrols the task manager looking for things to be upset about. Your chat client - one of half a dozen applications you realistically have open - using 400MB of RAM on your 32GB workstation does not have a meaningful impact on your workflow. It's just offensive.

It's _either_ an Electron app, _or_ built to use as little RAM as possible.

I'm not an Electron hater, but if you are starting out with Electron then you are already at a far disadvantage both technically (see aforementioned RAM usage) and politically (many people won't use them, mostly for the technical reasons). FWIW I use the Telegram client which is an Electron app, but I would never use a text editor (Atom), email client, or other Electron app given an equivalent app based on C[++], Python, or even Java.

For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram.

Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most machines still have 8GB or less.

Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you pretending to for effect?

Electron is also how Microsoft essentially broke Skype (on purpose?) IMO.

For me Electron just stands for lazy companies/devs who are not interested in producing something elegant that runs as fast as possible.

Seriously, even if performance of JS has been dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st century now, the huge memory footprint of these abominations feels utterly wrong to me.

Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible.

If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.

You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does.

It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Don't forget your 300+mb needs to sit along side Slack's 300mb, Discord's 300mb, and so on... fuck even my Crashplan Backup client eats up three processes and another 300mb. It's inconsiderate as hell.

While you don't have to join in on that as a developer, you still have to be aware that 95% of users will have no idea that their instant messaging application uses 800mb of RAM to idle, or whether that's a bad thing.

When we talk about efficiency of (other) electron apps made for productive use… the web page says this project does run Doom (cool) at a resolution of 640x480. So electron cripples my 2022 machine down to something like a 100 Mhz Pentium. That is totally fine for a funny tech demo, but I hate the need to use such programs for my daily work.

But, sorry, Pentium, I must take that crippling stuff back. I had chat apps in 1998 that had much higher responsiveness and faster start-up time than the electron chat apps I need to use for work today.

You, dear reader, may have already guessed my point here. Today software development is done often with many layers of bloat and glue, just to save some developer time and necessary developer expertise in the short term. The price we pay for this is a tremendous waste of resources.

Some wrote on their blog, sorry don’t remember who, if Electron apps (which I assume the Telegram client is) uses to many resources, then don’t argue that it should be a native application, instead ask if we can make Electron more efficient. That’s a smart idea.