What's really a meme is:

"I got 32 GB of RAM, who cares?"

I see a parallel with networked services being developed and tested under "works for me" lab conditions without latency, jitter, or reduced bandwidth.

"It works fine on my 10 Gbps network, who cares about 2 extra MB of Javascript?"

For one, because the very moment you have that line of thought, you're probably already an outlier.

This attitude is dumb, people don't just have one thing open on their machine at a time.

If you're designing software like a music player (that is, something people are likely to want to keep running in the background while doing other things), you're just giving people a reason to switch to something else by taking up a bunch of memory carelessly, as it'll be one of the first things to go when the user needs the memory.

Definitely it has become a selection criteria when picking tools. Electron? I don't care what a developer uses, nor how fun it was to use. I care about end results.

But to be fair. An Open Source project done in someone's free time for the love of it and shared freely in the wild as a humble contribution to humanity for the price tag of a Like in a forum, really should use whatever the author feels like using, as long as they don't treat it as a product and attempt to market it like it was done with care for anything but the developer's ergonomy. For what is worth, it could be made of Minecraft Redstone if the author feels like it, and nobody can judge them for it.

I just went to amazon and typed in "windows laptop". The first two listed had 4gig ram

In order it was 4,4,16,8,16,4,8,16,4,16,32,8,16,4,32

9 of them were under $300

My dad had some really crap HP Celeron desktop. I don't remember it if had 4gig or more but I do remember it took 3 to 4 minutes of swapping continuously just to boot up and run all the crapware that HP had launch on startup in Windows.

That said, I'm not anti-electron. Here's some native app sizes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44690856

The overwhelming number of personal computing devices in active use are <4GiB of ram, and with operating systems following your reasoning too: less and less is available for applications.

Stop being greedy, even if it existed as you say, externalising your development cost by having higher runtime requirements is a mild form of resource exploitation for profit.

This might sound contradictory, but I agree with you. 300 MB is nothing!

Problem is, when the music player takes 500 (let's be honest those 300 were probably just a cold-start and before actually doing anything with it), the collaboration chat app takes another <let me check...> 650 MB (Slack right now for me), the profile loader I need for work is <checking again...> another 400. The text editor is 510 MB (VSCode, and still that is a well engineered and optimized Electron marble). The Pomodoro timer, 300 MB.

And on top of that I'm supposed to do my actual work! All that junk is stealing memory that should be available to Visual Studio and compiling my huge code base.

Hopefully we don't end up with Electron calculators, calendars, email clients, file browsers, and image editors, because those things also tend to be open long term in my desktop (which right now I can do without any second thought about being able to, because they are all properly done as decently optimized GUIs)

Missing the point. When developers dont have to give a shit about resource usage it can become a problem. When every app is using way more ram/memory than necessary it starts to add up.

This is why modern programs and games can barely run on modern hardware in many circumstances. There is no incentive for devs to be efficient.

It's not one program using a lot of memory. It's 45 of them all using way more than they need to. It adds up.

Except 8 GB of ram is really more like 3 because Windows uses 5 to do nothing. And then Chrome uses a couple more gigs. And then Lord have mercy if you have outlook.

So that's, like, two programs open and were already running out of memory.

I've just booted a fresh install of Win11 in Azure and it's sitting at 2.8GB with 2GB in the cache. Not all that bad.

I have 48gb of ram and memory consumption issues.

Apparently the new version [1] will use Tauri instead of Electron, which uses the OS's native webview.

[1] https://github.com/NuclearPlayer/nuclear-xrd

300 MB is 1.25% of my RAM. An application using 1.25% of my RAM seems reasonable.

It's more than all the RAM I had in my Windows 98 computer that ran Windows and Winamp, which was fully capable of playing music and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun at the same time.

Idealistically it should not be using so much memory and burning up the world’s silicon. Efficient computing is a backbone of why we trust computers. (I am horrified with the windows explorer in windows 11 nowadays for its slowness.)

Less efficient software means more frequent hardware upgrades.

It's 300MB of RAM when it's not doing much, it's the lowest possible value.

When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.

I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.

No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.

How about 10 electron applications all with different purposes using 12.5% of your RAM?

Sounds totally reasonable to me. I'm running ten windowed applications and they're still leaving 87.5% of my RAM available for other things? No problem there.

No they’re all trivial things that could all be using 1% of your ram. And when you try to do demanding work on your machine you often have to close half of them to avoid stutter.

I'm not running 10 Electron apps that are trivial. They tend to be actual functional applications.

And we're talking about memory usage here. Nothing is stuttering from not enough memory if they're only using 12.5%.

12.5% is just the ram. We’re not even talking about excessive cpu cycles for browser animations yet. That’ll get you stuttering.

Right, the subject is the RAM. Not CPU.

But who has 10 applications all showing animations at the same time? Or constantly animating at all? If a button animates when you click it, or a message animates when it pops up, it's not exactly slowing down my system.

The subject is the resources a Chromium based app uses. RAM is just the example that was used. I don’t think theres a path here where we keep sharing valuable insight on this topic. Clearly you don’t mind Electron apps. Others do however and dislike this trend of using more and more resources because we can.

This non-concern for resource usage and good software design is why energy costs are sky rocketing today.

Modern OS's handle it just fine.

1.25% of Elon Musk's net worth is $5.2 billion dollars, but buying, I don't know, a new PC for that price would not be reasonable.

Okay, bad analogy. My point is: just because your budget is high and you've got bytes to burn doesn't mean all those bytes should be burned.

Paying for RAM and having it sit around doing nothing is stupid.

This is true for autoscaling VMs which run one application and when underutilized the load is reconsolidated.

It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.

Paying for RAM because a dozen different programs can't be bothered to make user focused software is stupid.

It's not doing nothing. It's caching frequently accessed files on my filesystem, which generally speeds everything up especially with HDDs. Why should someone instead waste that on a needlessly bloated music player?

…HDDs?

Hard disk drive

I don’t think it’s possible to find computers selling today with one of those.

If you open one of those bad boys up you'll find you can swap out and even add parts.

Regardless, RAM for disk cache is still useful on SSDs and my point still stands.

That choice is for me, the user, to make. App developers don't get to make it for me. If apps are smaller, then I can use that memory to run more apps, cache things, etc.

So choose not to use the app, dear god this conversation is awful.

I do. The instant I saw it uses Electron, I decided the app wasn't for me and closed the tab. But why would that mean I shouldn't participate in a discussion (which I didn't even start myself) on whether the excessive RAM usage is ok?

So choose not to partake the discussion, dear god this conversation is awful.

This is why inflation is rampant.

FWIW: That’s way less than gnome calculator used the last time I installed Ubuntu. At least this thing is not using snap or flatpack or whatever.

Having just launched gnome-calculator on my Ubuntu install, the resident memory size is 63768 bytes, or 63.77 kB. So I don't quite think that's an accurate depiction

It must no longer be launching an entire container just for it then.

It took a few seconds to launch too. It was possible to uninstall the snap and install the deb, fixing all these issues, but it wasn’t the default, and I gave up on Ubuntu around that time.