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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

That's true for Electron apps. For other kinds of desktop app, it's mostly stuff like artwork, double buffers and fonts. Go profile a desktop app heap and see for yourself.

One of the main selling points of Turbo Pascal was OWL: the Object Windows Library, which was just a big OOP abstraction over Win16. Here's some sample code:

https://github.com/TeamVault/pascal-programs/blob/master/Pas...

Doesn't look radically different to how a GUI app that targets a native framework would look today. OWL added bloat to make developer lives easier. It was ever thus.

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I think its true for most types of modern development for apps with a UI, not just electron

>Doesn't look radically different to how a GUI app that targets a native framework would look today

Modern "Native" frameworks are part of the problem. I cant comment on Windows current state as I havent used Windows since I moved my gaming rig from Windows 7 to Linux many, many years ago but even then Windows frameworks were a complete mess

Take Libadwaita for example. I migrated an old, very simple disk image manipulation utility app last year from GTK2 to modern gnome. No change in capabilities, a simple clone in GTK4 / Libadwaita. It went from using ~19MB to ~185MB without any additional functionality simply by switching the "Native" framework

Try GSK_RENDERER=cairo and see if it helps. I think the memory usage increase will mostly be GPU buffers. If GPU rendering isn't necessary for your app then it's pure bloat to use it, indeed. But with very large hi res screens it's often the case now that CPU rendering can't keep up anymore.

3 MB RSS less with GTK4 4.22.4 on Debian Forky (testing).

> GTK4

After my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235430 I've investigated the high RAM jump issue a bit further. It turned out, 60 MB comes from MESA / video graphics driver, right after the first function call, that triggers OpenGL/... context initialization. Thus:

  GTK2 14 MB
  GTK3 24 MB
  GTK4 38 MB  (+ 60 MB video acceleration)

Looks a bit better. But we still need 98 MB total.

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