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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

That is actually not a bad amount, the native Telegram macOS client hovers around the same. WhatsApp Web (also built on Electron) consumes a staggering 300-500mb.

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What constitues a "bad amount"? It is displaying a series of text onscreen, with a history of messages for each contact. What's it eating all that RAM for? My mind boggles.

Wow! A race to the bottom of the memory pool.

Electron is several things which HN guidelines probably won't allow me to describe here. I avoid it whenever I can.

That's all very true, but can you point to an alternative? If you were a small team with few resources, and you wanted to ship a cross-platform desktop app, what would you choose?

There ar plenty of portable toolkits out there. Gtk, Qt, WxWidgets, Fltk, Tk, several others, with bindings to more or less any language you may care to think of. And Lazarus/FreePascal, of course.

You may even embed some web-engine. It doesn't have to involve obscene amounts of megabytes and the selling of your soul to the Google monster.

I would choose wxWidgets personally. Easy to build the libraries, plenty of samples.

Some bugs here and there but paired with a tool to layout UIs (like wxFormBuilder), you can get a lot done.

300MB is what I see trying to run the MS Teams client. So I don't bother and use a browser instead.

Native Telegram takes only 80mb on my Mac.

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