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by mrweasel 1092 days ago
Why is it that VSCode is the only good Electron app? I get that Microsoft have talented developers, but so does other companies, yet VSCode remain the single application that shows that Electron apps can work.
4 comments

Even though it is based on web tech and Electron, VSCode cares about performance, while garbage like Microsoft Teams does not. That's about it.
I use discord and gitkraken every day and I've never had any issues either. People just like to complain. They act as if using a few hundred megabytes for the main app you are using is an issue. It's not the 90s anymore ram is cheap, especially at those amount.
Why is it better to have a million people buy more RAM, creating a large amount of electronic waste and emissions, instead of putting some effort into not unnecessarily wasting resources?
You don't need to buy more ram. It was already cheap a decade ago. Ram has been in the multiple gigabyte range for longer than that. Having an app that you use all the time every day use a few hundred of the otherwise unused ram is perfectly reasonable.
> It's not the 90s anymore ram is cheap, especially at those amount.

I just wrote the exact same thing in another comment.

That's what the problem is ... it's the old timers complaining that things aren't native, thus they are RAM hogs and are slow by default. Even if they are fast, they are "slow and bloated" just because it's the gut reaction when you have layers on layers of other stuff over native code.

And I'm an old timer but I am not complaining. I love VS Code and I think it's blazing fast for what I need it for, a large Angular enterprise application.

Or maybe you're just fine with throwing away thousands of dollars at it every few years, so you're not seeing the problem. The "solution" that most of the world simply cannot afford.
If I could roll my eyes any harder, they’d be spinning.

99.9% of people who complain about electron apps are not ardent defenders of third world computing. It just violates their sensibilities.

I am not one of those "99.9%" (seems like a random number pulled out of someone's ass). Most developers in my poor country don't make much and would quality as lower-middle class in yours. Including a good friend of mine, who is learning web development on a 10-year old laptop — he can't afford anything else. I know he struggles with VSC because I hear about it daily.
I feel for your friend, and I hope he gets some better hardware solutions soon.

But I think it’s unfair to hold developer tools back to 10 year old specifications.

Of cut it off with most of the world bullshit, we’re talking about development tool here, not solving world hunger.
There are no developers outside Silicon Valley, got it.
Right, because world is divided in Silicon Valley and third world hellholes.
People act as if their precious app is the only one a user is going to run and has the right to hog all the memory and CPU.
> Why is it that VSCode is the only good Electron app?

Because you need to sink hundreds of thousands of man-hours into making it work.

And fight against web tech most of the time you're doing that.

Also, Figma.
I think WebAssembly might play a role there. https://twitter.com/mattrickard/status/1410714002456383490
Obsidian also