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Comment by da39a3ee | Hacker News Reader

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff

I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow?

The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

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It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue).

What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps.

Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet.

Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that.

Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.

> I see people down voting without any reason.

What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".

A typo. I meant "without giving any reason".

Also, I'd be interested to know what you count as blazing fast.

Try opening a big complex html file and scroll immediately in VS Code and in Sublime text. Sublime Text blows VS Code out of water. This lag made me switch back to Sublime Text from VS Code.

Are you referring to the way VS Code is slow to display the syntax highlighting on file open sometimes? (Is that when it's getting highlighting via LSP?)

Yes. While syntax highlighting is getting rendered, scrolling lags a lot which is really annoying when you want to get to a specifc part of the file quickly. Once I noticed this, it was very hard not to see the same lag everywhere. LSP-I don't know how this works.

Curious if you tried with extensions disabled? I just attempted opening both a 100k and 1m line html file in both VS Code and ST, in the 100k case they both were quick to open but Code was a bit smoother in scrolling, in the 1m case ST took a long time to open (showed a loading progress bar for a few seconds before anything), and while Code was choppy to scroll ST was almost unusable.

That being said, with extensions enabled it can be a totally different story - some extensions will try to load the text content on every editor opening or even edit, which gets unusable very quickly. (Yes they run in a separate process, but that’s not a cure-all)

Tested on 2018 MBP.

(On VS code team, had nothing to do with the editor perf)

IntelliJ is not native, it’s Java, which ironically used to be considered a slow VM unsuitable for desktop apps, until Electron came along and was like “you think that’s slow? Hold my beer!” Now I much prefer Java desktop apps over Electron ones.

VS Code is the exception to the rule. MS has spent lots of time optimising it.

However most apps don't, and even MS' other apps are total crap, like MS Teams. If it was so easy to take the lessons learned from VS Code and apply it to their other apps they would do so I'm sure.

I meant MS' other electron apps by the way. Can't edit anymore.

Skype for Business for Mac also comes to mind. Sometimes it takes up 800MB of memory. For an IM app..... :X

I do consider the Slack desktop app to be a resource hog. Even on my brand-new M1 MacBook Air it sometimes takes a few seconds for channels to load. On my older Windows computer it's borderline unusable with how bad the text inputs lag. Sometimes I will have typed out an entire message and hit send before any of the text appears in the input box.

In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat.

I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.

how can you say that this is perfectly fine : https://streamable.com/lzhvjf

takes ages to open, takes ages to resize, etc etc. my hands shake whenever I have to interact with that mess (thankfully ripcord exists)

my computer is an intel 6900k (16-core) with 64 gb of ram and a gtx 1080 so processing power is not an issue.

I guess you're right! I'd never noticed the laggy resizing (I use a laptop so nearly always have apps taking up the full screen). But I see that also (recent MBP w/ 32Gb RAM).

I just did a comparison with slack running in chrome and, maybe I'm saying something silly here, but the difference seems to be that I'm simply unable to resize the chrome window at the same speed when the tab inside is displaying slack. So I was unable to "leave the content behind" as you did in your video of the electron app (and as I was also able to do with the electron app).

The problem with Electron apps is that they're using an embedded browser. As more and more apps are moving to Electron you're running a whole lot of browsers altogether on one system.

I don't want to waste hundreds of MBs of memory just on one small app :)

There's good Electron apps, yes. Like VS code, which is fast and optimised and uses very little resources. But most Electron apps are wasteful. Even the other ones from MS like Teams are horrible.

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