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Electron apps (lemmy.world)
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[-] FishFace@piefed.social 35 points 1 day ago

It's kind of an abomination when VsCode, supposed to be a lighter IDE, runs like dogshit compared to JetBrains, a fuckin' Java based IDE. Since when was Java light on RAM?

(Caveat: I haven't directly compared their memory usage, my experience is in very difference codebases for each)

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 24 points 1 day ago

Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.

VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.

[-] FishFace@piefed.social 12 points 1 day ago

It's not "horseshit" - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don't need to be so antagonistic.

lightweight

I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there's a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn't cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao

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[-] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

It's not really an IDE and it's not lightweight either.

It's not snappy. Sometimes just moving up a couple lines fast causes my caret to lag, which is not pleasant.

That might have more to do with when you have lots of plugins for LSPs, etc, but who uses vscode without any plugins?

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.

It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.

Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they're not actually IDEs?

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[-] Xylight@lemdro.id 4 points 1 day ago

It's not lightweight in terms of memory but it's definitely not slower than jetbrains. I use both frequently, but prefer vs code because it feels much snappier to use.

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[-] thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 day ago
[-] MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 6 points 1 day ago

i doo doo love it too.
does it have syntax support for Gcode yet? I do CnC (not the kinky kind) and I love to see shit in color. there's only a few specialized editors that I have come across that do this reasonably well..

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[-] BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago

And here I was thinking this was about emacs and lisp. Yougster complaining about not knowing how to quit Vi smh they have never experienced the horrors of emacs

[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 15 points 1 day ago
[-] DoctorPress@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

"Just get more ram" isn't a solution

[-] weissbinder@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

I use geany btw

[-] WormFood@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

the problem isn't electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google's been bolting features onto it for decades.

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me still using sublime text

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[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that's buggier and has fewer features.

There is no magic bullet of being like 'just code the exact same thing in C'. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.

[-] velindora@lemmy.cafe 7 points 1 day ago

The happy medium is Tauri or Wails. No (less) bloat. People should stop using electron and google tech.

[-] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thank you for saying this. I'm seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They're not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It's usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.

All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and "the good old days" while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn't fucking Quake. It's gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That's the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.

Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like "software is unoptimized now" is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don't really know what they're talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don't really know what they're talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.

It's incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don't like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people's apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don't know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It's so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like "pathetic, I could do better", especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you're paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We're just gonna act like that's worth nothing? It's so entitled to say "nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don't want to pay any more for the product and I don't care if you're a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don't do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you're trash".

[-] paequ2@lemmy.today 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.

🙋‍♂️ I have. Exactly because Electron = bloat. Granted it was just a small side project that I spent like a month or so building. I wanted to learn GTK4, Adwaita, GNOME Blueprints, and Vala.

I personally didn't think it was too miserable (again small project, not a ton of specialized needs). However, I 10000% completely agree with the "extremely non-customizable by comparison". I can totally see why companies don't want to look like a generic OS app. Getting the Bitwarden app to look like Bitwarden on Linux seems like it would be waaay harder and more time consuming than just reusing their existing HTML, CSS, and JS codebase. At least in my month of messing with GTK, it seems like desktop UIs have wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy less control over the UI than webapps do, at least by default. I'm guessing you can write more Vala to get a more custom UI in GTK, but again seems like waaaaayy more work for something highly custom.

By the end, I thought: Electron = bloat, but also Electron = apps existing at all.

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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
617 points (100.0% liked)

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