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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

> VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish

I see this mentioned quite often here, but that's not a valid argument in favour of Electron Apps.

VSCode is the primary focus for a user when it's active - so it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources. Now if a bunch of background taskbar apps, calculators and notepads start doing the same, user experience is going to go downhill very quickly.

So basically, Electron is a good choice for apps in which you spend a lot of time; and a poor choice to be a preferred platform for an OS.

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I just bought an Onivim license cause I wanted to treat myself and they're using Revery as an Electron replacement. Not sure I understand why it is faster, but I have to say the startup time is almost instantataneous and it's really responsive on a Linux 2014 i5 4Go laptop (whereas VScode ...). So it might be a good alternative.

How is Onivim? I played aroud with it v1 but wasn't impressed enough to gamble money that they'd made breakthroughs in v2

I have only used it for one day so far. I have a hard time quitting my customized terminal vim so I haven't looked much how to configure it. The only thing I can say so far is that it's beautiful, works out of the box and it is really fast and responsive.

The impact could reduced if a single Electron runtime is shared across apps. Imagine the various HTML5 mobile phone environments, like Palm's webOS, but in a desktop setting.

Since electron is basically a headless browser, you would be opening up any app with an XSS vulnerability to any other app running in the runtime.

Headless? It even has the same debug console as the ordinary Chromium.

Basically the only thing it misses is the URL bar and navigation buttons. It's just a browser with some OS integration slapped on the side.

True, I’ve always thought of electron as phonegap/Cordova for desktops.

So it needs a isolation like firefox containers

Yes, we could have tabs to switch between different applications running on that shared runtime.

And a universal way of accessing any published application for that runtime through some kind of address bar.

That's essentially what a Progressive Web App is.

> it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources

I currently run 2 VScode instances and they literally total 70 MB. So no, it's not significant, on the contrary actually.

And to be fair, even if it was 700 MB, I wouldn't care. Even older machines have at least 4 GB memory.

I'm always puzzled by these kinds of retorts. It's wonderful that you've never experienced performance or resourcing issues with Electron apps. But just because you haven't, doesn't mean other people don't.

For the record, VSCode chugs like a MF on my Thinkpad running XFCE with 4gb of RAM. Meanwhile, Sublime Text flies

I'm not talking about Electron apps but about VSCode specifically. I just cannot reproduce high RAM usage with it on any machine. Slack in comparison sucks bad for example, but reports of high memory usage for VSCode sound like fakes from non-users/haters.

Sublime Text has been consistently slower for me than VSCode.

That’s simply not possible unless you mangled it with a broken extension. Sublime has its own native rendered with much, much lower latency.

You’re not looking at the right processes. The real work happens in “VS Code helper” child processes which take at least 500MB total, usually more. That memory is not sitting idle either, it means your CPU is churning a lot more, and its not nice when you realize your code editor is using 20%.

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