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by extr0py 3226 days ago
Author here - thanks for the kind words! Yes, your comment hits the nail on the head and echoes my thoughts exactly. Electron happens to be a great way to test out some of the thoughts and I ideas in an economical way - especially since my time to work on Oni is limited at the moment.

And I think the fat headroom for improvements is important to call out - when people talk about "Electron Bloat", they usually refer to one of 5 things:

1) Footprint (space on disk) 2) Memory usage 3) CPU usage (corresponding to battery life) 4) Responsiveness (esp typing latency) 5) Startup time

As you mentioned, across the board, there's a bunch of room for improvements - especially with tech like WebAssembly on the horizon! #1 and #2 are the hardest, because Electron will always have a fixed overhead - but when comparing to an IDE like Visual Studio, it's not over the top.

For my workflow, #4, #5, and #3 are most important, and Oni still has plenty of low-hanging fruit to tackle for each of those. If I find there is a blocker to getting to acceptable typing latency and startup time, I'd consider making a switch (potentially to a react-native-on -desktop solution), but I'm optimistic that with WebAssembly, React 16, Chrome 61, along with optimizations on the Oni side, there's still plenty of opportunity to improve performance.

1 comments

For 1) and 2), I have an idea that it would probably be better if we can have an "Electron factory" running in the background and serve all these apps. This turns the OS task manager into tabs of a browser, and any optimization done by a browser to speed up tab opening and page loading, still applies here. :)