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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

> It's an Electron app, but it is built to use as little RAM as possible

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.

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>many people won't use them, mostly for the technical reasons

I really don't think that's true outside of the HN echo chamber. Like OP, I am using a Macbook Air which is hardly a supercomputer and vscode runs perfectly fine on it.

There is almost universal hatred of the Slack app in our client relations department, due to performace. All use Mac laptops or Windows desktops, none of them know the term "Electron".

I wonder why people run slack stand-alone. I run it as a pinned tab in my browser and with browser notifications it works great. Very few issues running it this way and performance seems good.

I have Chrome users for browsing, personal email, work email and Slack. I had Slack in a separate Chrome window, in a pinned tab. I noticed that changing to my communications space was slow. By eliminating windows one-by-one, I discovered, the culprit was the Slack pinned tab. I tried the Slack standalone app instead, and that slowness is gone. I can't explain why, but the standalone native app may actually perform better. I think it's worth checking out.

I've gone back and forth between in-browser and stand-alone, but as my number of Slack teams grows, browser tabs get considerably less appealing. (I have five I monitor regularly and four more I don't care much about.)

Can't you build something "to use as little RAM as possible, given that it's using Electron"?

Telegram is not an Electron app. It's a Qt app written in C++.

At least on Mac you can get the telegram app, or something called Telegram Desktop, which is Electron-based

If you mean this, it's written in C++ https://desktop.telegram.org/

If you mean this, it's written in Swift https://macos.telegram.org/

Telegram is not an electron app. It's native C++ and QT

The official telegram desktop client is Qt.

>FWIW I use the Telegram client which is an Electron app

What OS are you using Telegram in?

CentOS 7.3

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