That doesn't make sense to me, you are still using a browser at the end of the day. Sure you can save some memory by not bundling Node (at the cost of making even reading a file much more difficult), but that's not orders of magnitudes.
Have one, real Multithreaded +, more efficient backend, will reduce memory and offer better performance.
Wails is also an alternative that does just that. Shared Web UI engine + Go compiled backend.
AFAIK Electron requires 1 Node instance (you can disable it for renderer processes and you can have 0 WebWorkers or only WebWorkers with Node.js disabled) which consumes like ~50MB or something like that, which probably accounts for stuff other than Node.js too, if the app you are using require multiple Node processes that use huge amounts of memory they are just badly written.
> Have one, real Multithreaded +, more efficient backend, will reduce memory and offer better performance.
You can't just share Node.js across multiple apps, Tauri just doesn't bundle it at all, which is a whole different story with mostly downsides from my point of view.
Ins't the easy answer. Each time a dev want to ignore valid comments.
I have the following electron app running: Spotify, Figma, VS Code, Discord, Slack. They all use more than 1 helper. Consuming between 600mb to 3.5gb.
Slack is much better than it was. But I wish they switch to something like Tauri or Wails in the future.
Is 600mb too much for VS Code? I guess it depends on what you are doing with it and which extensions you have installed etc., if you are running a pretty bare-bones installation and seeing 1GB+ memory usages in VS Code please open an issue in their issue tracker and tag me (same username as in HN).
> Slack is much better than it was.
And that didn't happen by switching to the website approach, I think you'll be disappointed if any of these apps end up switching to Tauri or Wails without significantly improving their code too. Which is why I'd predict no major player will jump ship.
Calling an app junk to justify is argument is unconvincing. Its still a widely used app that works as good as the competition. In the case of slack, their optimisation endeavour seems to cost them quite a lot. But sure I don't have the number. If they would have start the project in Tauri or Wails at the beginning, would that saved them the refactoring? I don't now. But we will need more team using that kind of alternative to gain the knowledge and real benefit.
At this point I rewriting a toy project from electron to wails and its great. But well, it's only a toy project.
That sounds like a lot, you are probably running some heavy extensions or too many of them I guess, could you post a screenshot of the "process explorer" window for your instance of vscode?
> Calling an app junk to justify is argument is unconvincing.
I couldn't care less about what you think about Electron, that's just what I think.
But I think that would save much less memory than people think. A bare-bones hello-world Electron app consumes about ~100MB of RAM (rough figure since it depends on many factors), maybe you can bring that down to ~20MB by sharing a common browser instance (I doubt it, a Chrome tab takes like ~50MB for me right now), but if your app uses 1GB+ of memory that has way more to do with how the app is coded than by having to spawn another instance of the browser. Basically you won't get a memory hungry app consuming 10x less memory by running it as a website.