I used to disagree with this view, since I was "raised" in school to think that raw performance is the only worthy attribute of a computer program, regardless of purpose. Then, when I started working on real products instead of homework I learned how wrong that way of thinking was.
Of course it does not apply to everything, some apps do need every last clock cycle of speed, but so far none of mine had.
How about Electron-based chat apps like Slack and Teams? We know it's possible to implement this kind of functionality in <40MB of RAM, rather than the 300MB used by Slack and Teams. [0] If these apps are going to be running constantly, it essentially means you've paid for 260MB of RAM more than you're able to use, on account of Slack putting their developer convenience before your computational resources. This seems especially silly to me as many companies pay good money for the privilege.
For comparison, the Playstation 3 has 256MB of system RAM, and manages to run GTA V.
Yea, completely agree. I think context is very important here. We should not be making the same arguments for a one-person side business and a company with 400MM in revenue. Slack really can't stand on the arguments presented in the article.
Ripcord itself demonstrates why Slack is written in Electron.
Is there a mobile app? Nope! Dead on arrival. In 2020, Slack or Teams or anything similar is literally useless without a mobile app.
Feature matrix says animated emojis will arrive "never." lol!
I remember the days of native chat clients like Skype and AIM. I remember how Linux and Mac platforms were basically half-clients compared to Windows. It sucked.
Electron applications like Slack and Spotify work everywhere, exactly the same. And if you think about it, that's why something like chat and music apps would prioritize ease of cross-platform deployment over perfect efficiency. They're not particularly demanding, and they are most valuable to people when they're ubiquitous. If Spotify isn't in every device I own it loses a great amount of value.
Nobody's sitting at their Activity Monitor staring at the RAM usage of Slack or Teams. In reality, performance is fine. It's just chat.
(Interestingly enough, I've never found a music application that skips tracks more quickly than Spotify, even for locally-stored music. It's just instant with no gaps.)
That's why I used it for my example. Past systems are a useful benchmark for what it's practical to do with a certain level of computational horsepower.
> Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
My system has 8GB, so 3.7%. I'd rather have 3.4% of my memory back.
More broadly, we should consider that we may run many bloated apps. Even if Slack doesn't do too much harm on its own, if all your desktop apps are using 10x the resources they could be using, it adds up to you spending more on hardware than you should have to.
You paid for that 16GB of RAM. That should let you do a lot more than old computers can, rather than doing the same things we did 15 years ago with bloated software.
> At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
Right, like Ripcord, it did roughly the same thing Slack/Teams do, using far fewer resources.
Honestly though, why would you rather have that 3.4% of ram back?
Is the bottleneck in your system actually ram usage? Because I think implicit in your view is that you have a better usage for that ram. If so, what?
Because I really struggle coming up with more than about 5 electron apps I might ever run at any given time (Slack, VSCode, Discord, maaaybe Etcher..., and I'm basically out of ideas). Even then, two of those apps are both chat apps and I probably shouldn't have Discord open for work, and I don't use slack for any personal reason.
Basically - Electron apps are all applications that are UI heavy. I don't have the mental power to manage more than about 5 open and active UI apps before I'm the bottleneck, not the computer.
So at 5, you're spending 15-18% of your RAM on 5, 5! apps that you want to be interacting with rich GUIs at any given time. I just don't see it.
At least for my use cases, electron apps almost always make up a trivial amount of my total ram usage. Docker/Development Env/Vms DOMINATE in comparison.
So while I get that it could be faster, the reality of the situation is that without electron, none of the apps I listed would work on Linux at all. Instead they all do by default.
So right now on amazon, 16gb of ram is 53 bucks for a decent module. 150/16000 = .009. So basically - I paid 49 cents, and got apps that work by default on my platform of choice. That's pretty fucking amazing compared to old platform specific apps.
Plenty of people only have 2-4GB of RAM, and Slack eating up 360MB along with a couple other bloated apps and some God-foresaken autoplaying video ad can easily start requiring swapping and slow a computer to a crawl.
Sure, people could spend more money to mostly sidestep the issue (supposing they didn't have any workloads which actually benefited from all available RAM), but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
I'm guessing you're not going to run Slack unless you're at a company. And I'm guessing if you have 2-4GB of RAM you are not running a company issued computer. And if for some odd-ass reason you are running on a personal computer with 2-4 GB of RAM and NEED slack, why not just run it in a chrome tab?
It will use about the same amount of memory when run in a Chrome tab, as that doesn't much differ from the application version (essentially just a bundled Chromium browser). It would save you from running two different Chromium browsers at once, but I don't think the saving is all that significant. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25167153 )
I meant that as a nod to the person to whom you're replying, as well as the author of the article. Of course it's possible for indie developers to build native apps — but I don't begrudge them for avoiding that route, especially if their day job doesn't involve it. I am perfectly fine with criticizing giant companies for building chat apps atop Electron.
The Slack app is essentially a Chromium browser running the usual web-based Slack. It uses the same amount of resources running in a tab in your browser.
I think there are some UI niceties to the 'app' version but it's essentially the same.
Teams refers to Microsoft's competing product. Like Slack, its desktop app is really just the web version.
> The Slack app is essentially a Chromium browser running the usual web-based Slack. It uses the same amount of resources running in a tab in your browser.
I would expect that a pinned Slack tab in Chrome/Edge would be able to share some resources with the browser that a separate Slack app can't.
Has anybody tested the performance difference between running 100 browser tabs vs. running the same webapps as 100 electron processes?
You'll be lucky if you get Teams to work in a 300mb. I regularly see it hitting 1GB. The fact is though that even if it was implemented as a native up it relies so much on web views for its addons which would probably not give much benefit cause it would need to run tens of webviews as a native up to have the same functionality.
In general, I think you're right - but that mindset can quickly become one of shifting costs to others: E.g., $framework-of-your-choice may increase your velocity and allow you to ship faster.
However, it might also make it harder to find bugs and it will produce bloat with real, noticeable consequences - e.g. increased RAM, CPU and disk usage, more sluggish UI behavior, etc - except, those effects will happen on the user's machine, not the developer's, so a developer might be tempted to ignore them.
Of course it does not apply to everything, some apps do need every last clock cycle of speed, but so far none of mine had.