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by scott_w 882 days ago
> I've never seen a chat app taking gigabytes of RAM before Electron, for example.

Is that a general software problem or a problem specific to Electron? Is that a permanent problem or a problem right now because of the technology and your attitude towards it?

I say this because I do recall seeing complaints about Java being bloated in the 2000s. I briefly used Swing in my university days and it was pretty awful compared to HTML at the time. In 2044, maybe I'm going to be shaking my fist at the new-fangled tech and telling everyone how nice Electron apps were in comparison.
1 comments
nottorp 882 days ago
> complaints about Java being bloated in the 2000s.

It's bloated in the 2023s too. Last year I caught Android Studio (which I wasn't even using at the moment, just had it open from a quickie fix a few days ago) going over 4 Gb of ram. I had two projects open, under 20k lines of code total (ok, maybe I should count again).

But why bring Java in? We're talking about native applications vs applications that pull in a copy of Chrome and half of the npm registry. Java isn't native either.

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scott_w 882 days ago
> But why bring Java in?

Why not?

> We're talking about native applications vs applications that pull in a copy of Chrome and half of the npm registry.

You might be but I'm not. I'm talking about the state of software in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and today and how a general "it's worse" isn't particularly useful (or probably even true).

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nottorp 882 days ago
> or a problem specific to Electron?

Oh and... if you want problems specific to Electron... I'm pretty sure Discord was keeping all the cat pictures and memes that it had ever displayed uncompressed, in ram, for a long while. Memory usage of several gigabytes if you had the meme channel open. Even it displayed only the last 3 cats.

It's better these days but it was a problem for years. And tbh I'm not sure they fixed it or even realized or cared about the problem or one of the 2498127 npm packages fixed it.

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scott_w 882 days ago
> Oh and... if you want problems specific to Electron...

It seems you don't get my point so let me be explicit:

Pointing out issues with a single framework that powers a subset of software does not mean there is a general decline in software quality across the industry.

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nottorp 882 days ago
Said framework has religious like defenders whose only motivation is "it's easier/cheaper for me and the user be damned" though.
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