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Comment by mikkelam | Hacker News Reader

The UI is probably written with compose https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb

I believe so as well. Compose is very similar to Electron. Jetbrains Toolbox (which uses compose) uses 500mb memory which is on par with what Electron would use for such a simple app.

Except Electron is 8 years old, and Compose desktop has started active development half a year ago.

I just checked. On my Windows laptop from work it uses 18.5 MB in the background. It uses 220-240 MB in the foreground though. Which seems totally unnecessary.

I already ditched the Toolbox app on macOS, because it marks the binaries as Intel only (while they're universal). The IDE's built in updater seems fine if you're only using the stable versions. So I think I'm just going to remove the Toolbox app from all my machines.

Why would it be similar? It doesn’t need all the unnecessary abstraction of a browser/DOM. Also, initial memory usage doesn’t mean it scales the same way from then on.

It uses JVM and JVM tends to hunk all memory for object pools so it can allocate fast if needed.

I really hope that's not the case - at least the browser has an excuse of being a scripting platform, a 3D and 2D rendering and layout engine, a video streaming platform, a database, a server and who knows what rolled into one - that Toolbox thing hopefully has less than 5% of that in its codebase.

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