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Comment by homebrewer | Hacker News Reader

This feels like the often-repeated "argument" that Electron applications are fine because "unused memory is wasted memory". What Linus meant by that is that the operating system should strive to use as much of the free RAM as possible for things like file and dentry caches. Not that memory should be wasted on millions of layers of abstraction and too-high resolution images. But it's often misunderstood that way.

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It's so annoying when that line is used to defend applications with poor memory usage, ignoring the fact that all modern OSes already put unallocated memory to use for caching.

"Task Manager doesn't report memory usage correctly" is another B.S. excuse heard on Windows. It's actually true, but the other way around -- Task Manager underreports the memory usage of most programs.

Eeeh, the Electron issue is oveblown.

These days the biggest hog of memory is the browser. Not everyone does this, but a lot of people, myself included, have tens of tabs open at a time (with tab groups and all of that)... all day. The browser is the primary reason I recommend a minimum of 16gb ram to F&F when they ask "the it guy" what computer to buy.

When my Chrome is happily munching on many gigabytes of ram I don't think a few hundred megs taken by your average Electron app is gonna move the needle.

The situation is a bit different on mobile, but Electron is not a mobile framework so that's not relevant.

PS: Can I rant a bit how useless the new(ish) Chrome memory saver thing is? What is the point having tabs open if you're gonna remove them from memory and just reload on activation? In the age of fast consumer ssds I'd expect you to intelligently hibernate the tabs on disk, otherwise what you have are silly bookmarks.

Your argument against electron being a memory hog is that chrome is a bigger one? You are aware that electron is an instance of chromium, right?

This is a good point, but it would be interesting if we had a "just enough" rendering engine for UI elements that was a subset of a browser with enough functionality to provide a desktop app environment and that could be driven by the underlying application (or by the GUI, passing events to the underlying app).

Problem there is Electron devs do it for convenience. That means esbuild, npm install react this that. If it ain't a full browser this won't work.

Funny thing about all of this is that it's just such oppressive overkill.

Most GUI toolkits can do layout / graphics / fonts in a much simpler (and sane) way. "Reactive" layout is not a new concept.

HTML/CSS/JS is not an efficient or clean way to do layout in an application. It only exists to shoehorn UI layout into a rich text DOCUMENT format.

Can you imagine if Microsoft or Apple had insisted that GUI application layout be handled the way we do it today back in the 80s and 90s? Straight up C was easier to grok that this garbage we have today. The industry as a whole should be ashamed. It's not easier, it doesn't make things look better, and it wastes billions in developer time and user time, not to mention slowly making the oceans boil.

Every time I have to use a web-based application (which is most of the time nowadays), it infuriates me. The latency is atrocious. The UIs are slow. There's mysterious errors at least once or twice daily. WTF are we doing? When a Windows 95 application ran faster and was more responsive and more reliable than something written 30 years later, we have a serious problem.

Here's some advice: stop throwing your web code into Electron, and start using a cross-platform GUI toolkit. Use local files and/or sqlite databases for storage, and then sync to the cloud in the background. Voila, non-shit applications that stop wasting everybody's effing time.

If your only tool is a hammer, something, something, nails...

> Eeeh, the Electron issue is oveblown.

> These days the biggest hog of memory is the browser.

That’s the problem: Electron is another browser instance.

> I don't think a few hundred megs taken by your average Electron app is gonna move the needle.

Low-end machines even in 2025 still come with single-digit GB RAM sizes. A few hundred MB is a substantial portion of an 8GB RAM bank.

Especially when it’s just waste.

And this company that says: let's push to the users the installer of our brand new app, that will reside in their tray, which we have made in electron. Poof. 400MB taken for a tray notifier that also accidentally adds a browser to the memory

My computer: starts 5 seconds slower

1mln of computers in the world: start cumulatively 5mln seconds slower

Meanwhile a Microsoft programmer whose postgres via ssh starts 500ms slower: "I think this is a rootkit installed in ssh"

>otherwise what you have are silly bookmarks.

My literal several hundreds of tabs are silly bookmarks in practice.

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