I can't believe fucking Google, aka me cha for SWEs decided that the best they can do is shove all that ram into our computers for Chromium. All of the major apps decided Electron was a good idea and now all of our computers are bloated with fatass memory hogs taking 600MB RAM.

Fuck you Goog.

I fucking hate Electron apps too. Why the fuck they can't write in QT?

What a beauty is QT

@realJeffBezos Qt is really expensive if you want to make a commercial app with it. See for yourself. Aldo node has a better package ecosystem

I'll keep on saying it:

Nw.js

Yes

@Sony-wf-1000xm3 NodeJS is expensive too.

You just don't know it.

500 MB just for modules.

On top of that, it eat ram.

Expensive than QT license!!

@Sony-wf-1000xm3 Assuming his Electron apps are Slack and Skype, QT is nothing for them.

They can buy 100 year worth license in one night.

@AtuM Linux is proprietary under open source mask.

$$$ -> Consulting & Conferences -> Linux Foundation

$$$ -> Startups -> IPO -> Gift -> Linus

Redhat rocked it :D

In my eyes, Linux is Fauxpen Source!!

Unused ram is wasted ram.

@realJeffBezos Firstly most users do not care. You can assume a user can spare one gb of ram. SInce windows eats around 2gb ram and most laptops and desktops have 4 gb of ram. Also storage is pretty cheap now. Also have you checked the pricing. One developer license of QT for application development for a year costs $3950 and QT design studio to make easier slick Uis easier costs $990 per year for one developer. Also juist check rants about QT on devrant, devs are a bit tired of working with it so QT devs will take more salary and maybe a bit more since they are working with c++.

While electron is free of cost and since it is hot currently you can find decent cheap young talent. Also node has a better package ecosystem allowing for faster development and a package manager last time I checked

@realJeffBezos Firstly most users do not care. You can assume a user can spare one gb of ram. SInce windows eats around 2gb ram and most laptops and desktops have 4 gb of ram. Also storage is pretty cheap now. Also have you checked the pricing. One developer license of QT for application development for a year costs $3950 and QT design studio to make easier slick Uis easier costs $990 per year for one developer. Also juist check rants about QT on devrant, devs are a bit tired of working with it so QT devs will take more salary and maybe a bit more since they are working with c++.

While electron is free of cost and since it is hot currently you can find decent cheap young talent. Also node has a better package ecosystem allowing for faster development and a package manager last time I checked

@Sony-wf-1000xm3

Users care. See user who posted rant.

QT provide source code protection by default but Electron don't thus leaving your source code for anyone to unpack which I believe no company wants, apparently they have no idea it's even possible it seems!

QT is easy, fast. I have no complaints.

It would indeed be nice that Electron alternatives like Neutralinojs, Tauri, Vuido, Proton Native and Flutter (once its desktop support expands) takes over (not sure about NodeGUI, NW.js and Meteor which could be heavier).

> "taking 600MB ram"

This isn't the 90s anymore, you know? The average PC packs quite a lot of ram. 600mb ram is nothing in 2021 (it's literally 1.8% of the ram on any of my machines).

However, I will agree that Electron apps are crap and lazy.

@spongessuck unused ram is potential ram

@realJeffBezos you can obfuscate js aswell. Electron is just much more flexible than QT, and the only real downside is inefficiency. Nw.js is much less heavy tho.
And if you really care that much about RAM usage while still wanting to be relatively flexible and not lose the features that html and css brings then take a look at ultralig.ht

For everyone but large companies and/or some product types native apps just don't really make sense even if they're the cleaner way in theory.

Crazzzy question... but WHY are the Electron apps such hogs? In theory, a progressing web app in a desktopish wrapper should be super lean and fast. Can we fix the problems?

I haven’t used QT, but isn’t the reason the choose Electron because they can share all of the code and the components and stuff between projects?

Chrome seems to be the culprit whenever my MacBook gets mad. But Discord doesn’t seem very heavy.

@sheriffderek Because Electron apps bundle all their dependencies in the binary (cf. static linking) and use Chromium.

To those people saying unused RAM is wasted RAM - we should pollute as much as possible and stop giving a fuck about air quality. Unused fossils is wasted fossils right?

I don't like running 5 of these Chromium apps and having the computer become a choke artist.

@Berkmann18 I guess I just understand how chromium works. Can’t they tree shake the packages - and just use less of chromium? Isn’t it just a thing that allows you to make http requests? So, it’s just like having many full versions of chrome open? It’s seems like it should be more like having an extra tab open.

@sheriffderek the problem is you can't expect a compatible chromium version to just be available. You could also just make a webapp or PWA then... That's almost exactly what you mean. But you don't get access to native APIs.
Still, i think the overhead is often worth the numerous other advantages

@eval JS obfuscation is weak and not strong as with C++

C++ is complex and the generated code is complex too while C is not.

Decompilers are bad at decompiling C++ code . They need extra mess of plugins to decompile a OOP based C++ code.

@realJeffBezos you can obfuscate js really well if you absolutely need to. What do you even want to protect from? Obfuscation is no solution. If you really want to protect your IP then run some important parts of your product serverside.

@sheriffderek I haven't dug that deep in Electron so I guess it could be possible especially given what alternatives do but I suspect it's not straight forward or doable in Electron.
And it's more like a window vs Hybrid Apps and PWAs which end up much lighter.

@eval You actually _can_ use native APIs in PWAs but a lot less than HAs (Hybrid Apps) which quite have full access compared to Native Apps.

Some good examples are whatpwacando.today and whatwebcando.today (for PWAs) and Capacitor for HAs.

@Wisecrack Nw.js isn't bad but it's not without its quirks.