613
Electron apps
(lemmy.world)
i use neovim btw
LOL.
Enjoyable little irony personally for me, as when I asked an LLM to churn out a readme for my fin project ( posted on lemmy here ), it proposed one of fin's advantages that could push fin into the notable category: "Performance niche - might be faster than Electron-based editors for simple tasks". Maybe I should change that to "save a fortune on RAM compared to Electron-based editors".
Electron apps existed and were a standard years before this current memory shortage. There is no connection there.
I think there is. I would say the connection is not that electron didn't exist before, but that now that ram prices are high, an increase in the number of electron apps becomes a problem because of the ram usage. Not that the usage wasn't a problem before, but that more people are using even more electron apps now than ever, hence their "industry standard" comment.
But it’s not like electron apps became an industry standard now that there is a memory shortage. I also don’t think there is an increase in electron apps now that there is a memory shortage. These things are not connected in the way the meme suggests. Is it more problematic since memory is more expensive? Sure, maybe for some people running old hardware that want to upgrade. Otherwise, a lot of people already have plenty of memory to run these apps.
I do not see the causal connection you are seeing in the meme at all. I just see it pointing out that now is a particularly bad time for Electron apps to be so dominant, which is true.
You aren't reading the meme correctly. It's not a connection, is a coincidence.
It just says a thing ,that uses 500 mb of ram per instance, had become an industry standard. That's the happy face. Hey I created a thing for myself but it got used so much it became a standard.
The second face is like oh shit, I did not make this efficient with its memory usage but now it's standard and ram prices are terrible so the thing that was sparking joy, is now kind of a problem because its flaws now actually matter
Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol
... Now got the idea of doing lemmy through Emacs.
There's probably a mode for that.
... ah, there's one.. https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el
Looking pretty good right now. ;D
Atom was kinda revolutionary in its plugin support and everything IIRC.
Well, now that Atom has been replaced by VSCode, which is also an electron app, the original Atom devs, or at least some of them, are creating Zed. Zed's written in Rust and uses a lot less memory.
Of course it's not yet as mature and they're trying to earn money by integrating AI and selling that as a service. BUT the AI is voluntary and even if you do want to use it, you don't have to pay to use their AI (which comes with a free tier if you DO want to use it), you can literally run your own model in ollama.
It's not perfect, but I love how little RAM it uses compared to VSCode and (shudders) the Jetbrains suite (which I normally love, but hate the RAM and CPU usage, it can drive my computer pretty slow)
That explains alot. I have both PyCharm and RustRover open as I ~~steal~~ convert stuff from a project I found. Anywho I was typing in discord and I was typing faster than it rendered and I thought that was strange
still have the patch they sent for people who published packages. I made a theme no one but me used but still! Pre microsoft github was cool
Got that patch still in it’s brown envelope somewhere in a drawer, for doing a syntax highlighting plugin.
They were indeed cool
Historically I'd say Emacs plugin system predates atom and sublime, and was certainly as impressive in its flexibility.
It has become my favorite editor, even though I don't need or want the AI stuff. They do something that I do quite appreciate, that I wish other apps (looking at you, Firefox) would do:
In the AI section of the settings, the first thing is a toggle that turns off all AI features.
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Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.
Discord similarly is an affront.
If you have Spotify Premium, try a third party client. Even GUI clients like Spotify-qt are memory light [though not at feature parity] whilst terminal clients like ncspot, spotify-player take 1/10th the memory. The latter even supports Spotify connect.
Thank you for his hint.
Correction, Winamp still does this today while using a fraction of the resources.
Though if you're on Windows I'd recommend Xmplay instead, it plays basically everything.
I'm on Linux and I use VLC.
Have you tried AIMP on Windows? If so, how does it compare with Xmplay?
don't use winamp, use wacup
on linux use audacious
don't worry, this will all be solved now with incompetent vibe-coders, just give it a while
or you will look back to this with a nostalgic tear in the eye. one of these.
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If there's any upside to the entire situation, it's that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Some of the greatest games ever developed for consoles were great because the developers had to get extremely creative with the limited resources at their disposal. This led to some incredibly optimized games that could do a whole lot with those very limited resources.
If there’s any upside to the entire situation, it’s that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Amen.
Long time irked that so many developers fail with the mathematics of the situation.
If hardware multiplies its resources 1000x, that does not mean you can make your program use 1000x resources, along with thousands of other developers failing at that mathematics too, making bloat radically outpace Moore's Law.
If hardware multiplies its resources 1000x, that should mean that developers continue to keep their software tight, lean, and fast, and that should mean users have 1000x more resources available to do more with.
*Dreamer*
I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won't let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.
I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won't ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won't be fixed.
Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.
My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.
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You don't even need to go that far back. It blows my mind that the 360 and PS3 have 512mb of RAM. Halo 4, GTA 5, and The Last of Us did some impressive graphics work with 512mb.
Oh wow my mind is blown. Even more so that it's 256mb of DRAM and 256mb of VRAM separately.
We have really gone down hill and fast ;(
In my brain memory I find it hard to believe all the textures loaded at one time could ever be so small. Im amazed.
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Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
Kinda depressing what numbers are considered impressive these days.
Nobody's mentioning the system monitor taking 227MiB?
Jesus Christ, Steam at 1.4 GB and you are expected to run that WHILE PLAYING GAMES? That made my eyes pop outta my head.
There's no way that's normal. I'm pretty sure mine only uses a couple hundred.
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Scintilla my beloved
(This is the text editor component in Geany and Notepad++)
I'm sorry my comment is not deep enough to be his irrelevant to the topic but I gotta ask: Do you know a text editor which is just notepad but remembers the last session when you close it? I just need a scratchpad, even notepad++ is too fancy for my needs but that's what I was using on windows. Now I use kate but it feels like I'm killing a mosquito with a rocket launcher when a book cover would do.
Unless you want to get fancy for the sake of not being fancy, you will likely be best just sticking with Kate.
Basic editing can be done in vi or nano or even piped to a file via she'll. I don't think any of those are necessarily better or worse than using Kate. Vi and nano would probably be faster but you would need to be in a terminal already.
That said, I am curious as well if anyone has a better answer.
On KDE Plasma, I would stick with Kate and hide/disable some the fancier interface features. It might seem like overkill, but since it's built from common components that other KDE apps use using anyway, the additional resource consumption will probably be minimal. And it's quick.
On a Gtk desktop, you might try Mousepad. This is what I used before moving away from Xfce.
dude just fuckin
curl --data-ram @ram https://downloadmoreram.com/release/20.1until curl rewrites in electon and you don't have enough ram to run it anymore
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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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