When desktop applications running in electron, just doesnt have enough web abstraction to keep up with mores law, a hero comes along, to ensure there can always be one more level of java script between you and a responsive UI.
Now, maybe that's just a potential usage that trust-me-bro it'll never actually try to use or access in RAM or on disk... but how on earth is that number for a chat client so much bigger than either Firefox with 100+ tabs or even Java-based IDEs like Webstorm?
Javascript engines aside, that sounds like a great sci-fi movie macguffin material.
[1] https://foldoc.org/Big+bag+of+pages
[2] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerAl...
“Big number is scary” is not a good way to understand performance.
Plus, admittedly I didn't think about this thoroughly just now, this sounds like a cheap hack for speed. You could still have an OOB access that would land in some valid memory and thus lead to an exploit, right? It's just made very unlikely by making these areas very large and having ASLR. Proper bounds checks wouldn't have that problem.
VIRT is not a good measure of actual memory usage because it includes shared pages like file cache and libraries, RES is better.
Shameless plug: I developed a tool that try to compute a better value for memory usage: https://github.com/tatref/linux-mem