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Comment by ByteWelder | Hacker News Reader

In reality, I believe we're being let down by software developers who consider hardware resources like RAM and CPU as a free and unlimited resource. This includes web development. Electron apps like Discord/Slack/MatterMost/VSCode/etc. are a good example of this. Or Windows 10 versus Linux (or even macOS).

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This comes partly from the cloud-centric approach of "just scale up" instead of trying to optimise code. Lots of developers just want to throw more CPU/RAM at their inefficient code because "it's cheaper than the developer time to fix it" which is sort of true up to a point, until you have to hire a contractor to come in and reduce your AWS/GCP bill so you don't go out of business.

Honestly, web development has been exponentially worse than any other field of software development I have exposure to, including games. 90% of the time when I open task manager to figure out why things are so slow the answer is some Chrome tab. gMail is actually the culprit a shocking amount of the time. According to Chrome, my gMail tab is using more memory than Slack and Outlook combined and is an order of magnitude less responsive and reliable than either of those apps from my experience.

Depends, I still do pretty much SSR with vanillajs.

I could say to be in the minority, but apparently SPAs kind of rediscovered SSR is a thing.

Absolutely, the bloat has grown far faster among web apps. A modern VR game with many GB of assets handling vastly more difficult computations at super low latency can often still fit in 8GB of memory.

It's mind blowing that trivial tasks like editing a google sheet document have come to consume even remotely comparable resources. Google sheets as it existed 8 years ago was snappier and more responsive while using far less memory.

There seems to be more competition among games than "productivity" software when it comes to performance. It begs the question of how bad things will continue to become before it starts affecting the bottom line.

VS Code gets a pass, it is a quasi-IDE, Electron or not, it is a heavyweight. Tough I still use Sublime Text for performance reasons.

Discord and Slack: no excuses. These are chat apps running in the background. There could be a client taking just kilobytes it there was a will for it.

There is one, it's written by a single person in C++/Qt and rolls over both Slack & Discord in terms of UI performance : https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Almost like those reasons for using Electron about developer productivity are really exaggerated. I wish they would invest in a few people to help optimize performance to improve UX, as it affects every one of their users.

As a statement I spent almost the cost of a new car for being able to afford these kind of Electron apps.

I greatly dislike Electron, but since almost everyone is forcing that on us, I, as a protestor, got top-of the line hardware.

I got 128 Gb of RAM, i9-9880H, SSD NVME2, and a Quadro RTX 4000 8Gb, on a mobile workstation.

Let's see how much time left until Electron apps catch up in bloat.

A long time. You just have to stay ahead of the Mac as that seems to be what all the heavy electron apps are developed on these days.

My problem has always been smart phones because I refuse to drop $500+ dollars every 2 years as apps get hungrier

Yep. 6 GB of ram on a phone should be plenty for anything you can throw at it, but even that seems to be a lower midrange spec today.

New iPad has up to 16GB and I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to see an M1 or similar in the next iPhone pro maxx.

That ridiculous purchase is fully on you, my friend. You would have been absolutely more than fine with 16GB, or even 32GB if you're scared.

But given that quadro, I feel like this wasn't at all a protest, but rather you do some sort of resource heavy work such as 3d simulations or rendering. Yes, these pursuits have always been resource intensive. No, it's not the fault of electron.

I don't regret a single cent of it.

Nope, I don't do anything specialized, other than running some virtual machines while debugging and CI/CD pipelines. I've never exceeded 24 Gb of RAM in usage. At some point, I would like to run an small cloud infraestructure on this thing.

My 32GB, 2018 vintage work laptop is reporting 27 GB used, 4.13 cached, and 3.9GB swapped out.

I have two web browsers, VS code (remote mode only), and slack open. About 4GB is being used by corporate crapware. I use Firefox as a json viewer, so it’s using 0.5GB. Emacs is using 50MB and my imap client is using 260MB

Various UIs frequently hang waiting for swap. 32 GB is not enough, even though I’m using it like a dumb terminal.

I guess you're using Linux? Memory management for desktop applications is really sub-par compared to macOS or even Windows. My 16Gb mac has zero problems with a comparable workload.

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