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Discussion on: In Defense of Electron

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jraykowski profile image
jraykowski • Edited

I remember when we got our first IBM PC with 128K (yes, people really did useful stuff on 48K TRS-80s, Apple ][ various CP/M boxes).

My first reaction:

"128K! This is just going to lead to sloppy programming."

I was spot-f'ing-on then and its been repeated several times since.

No way I'd ever want to go back.

I'm not sure why anyone developing/using an electron app is shocked by its resource requirements. Modern browsers are basically a separate OS and runtime environment running in some other host environment (Win, Linux, MacOS).

How does that NOT consume vast amounts of resources?

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urbaez22 profile image
Alvaro Urbaez

Hi Jon, I invite you to check Nintendo64 games and architecture.
You'd say that's not related to the topic, but I think it does.
The most of N64 games are stored in 4MB, some of them finally came in 64MB.. And there was lots of textures, logic, among other things; CPU was 96Mhz and RAM just 4.5MB Rambus. Play those games were more complex than a desktop application to edit text, however, to execute Atom (for example) means lose at least 1GB of RAM..
Well programming in the current time has been forgotten, because everything is about time-to-market, but after that, companies forget to improve the logic of their apps, they continue adding more and more features without think in resources that these are consuming..
Do you want to build once and execute everywhere? Use Java.. As simple as that, it exists since 25 years ago and is one of the most mature technologies out there..
I don't hate Electron, however, it has to be improved urgently.. Frameworks are a double-edged sword..

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mrjoy profile image
Jon Frisby

I'm not surprised by it. I am, occasionally, surprised to find an app I'm interested in using is built on Electron. As soon as I find it is, I delete it. Because battery life matters.