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by maccard 3231 days ago
Every time electron apps come up, I bring up slack. It's currently using 1.3GB on my machine. I've got Spotify open too, with another 800MB. Adding another 8GB is easy at the lower levels, but I've got 32GB of ram in this machine, and regularly have to kill slack and spotify when compiling to get back 2-3GB.
3 comments
andai 3231 days ago
Does anyone know if there are any lightweight alternatives to Electron in the works? Or if such an idea even makes sense?
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type0 3231 days ago
It does make sense, not a lot of people seem to be interested though - https://github.com/pojala/electrino
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virmundi 3231 days ago
There are a few options.

http://alternativeto.net/software/electron/

One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.

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noloblo 3231 days ago
Like to see Alternatives to electron as well - even super optimized electron on code Atom and Google Chrome are quite heavy on a MacBook Air
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m-j-fox 3231 days ago
I remember XULrunner was fine like 15 years ago on a Pentium II. A lot less features and performance tho.
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enturn 3230 days ago
If you don't mind doing your UI in canvas (maybe with react-canvas) then these two look interesting, although Nidium doesn't seem to support desktop anymore. https://www.nidium.com/ http://impactjs.com/ejecta
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Can_Not 3230 days ago
Also, any election alternatives for desktop that specifically don't use a browser DOM? Something like react native for Linux/osx/windows or QT.
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bmarkovic 3230 days ago
There is Brig (https://github.com/BrigJS/brig) but despite the fact that QML and JavaScript are already "married", and the immense popularity of both Qt and JS, it's far, far, away from Electron's maturity.
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justsml 3231 days ago
Slack and Spotify lack critical optimizations. They appear to leak long term objects like crazy.

This isn't Electron's fault. I have plenty Java apps just as guilty.

I do wish Slack was a better case for Electron. JavaScript isn't immune from leaky bad patterns, just the same as other langs/environments.

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noloblo 3231 days ago
Slack Spotify an electron apps are not only memory hoggsThey also heat up the Mac so much
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