
I Have a Laptop with 4GB RAM – An Electron Rant - turrini
https://dev.to/sharazam/comment/iie
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smacktoward
I love one of the responses:

 _> Sure QT can create cross platform UIs, but with a $300 yearly price tag
for one developer and no support._

It's kind of amazing that we've gotten to a world where $300 for high-quality
dev tools is considered an unreasonable price. If your software has any kind
of revenue model at all, $300 a year is nothing! Cripes, I'm old enough to
remember the days when you had to pay companies like Microsoft four figures
per year _per developer_ just for access to _documentation._

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simion314
Except you can use Qt for free in proprietary applications too, the response
to that comment makes it clear.

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slededit
You can, but then you have 50MB of useless DLLs that static linking would
eliminate. At that point you have the same disk footprint as an electron app.
Memory use would still be order of a magnitude better though.

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simion314
This is not true, did you mean 50Mb ? And do you staticly build GTK or
Electron?

Qt is split into modules, so if you don't use Webkit you don't include that
module, if you don't use networking you don't include that, if you only do a
CLI app you don't include the GUI module.

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slededit
Its been about two years, but ~50MB was the range. Its quite possible the
necessary optimization wasn't done (I wasn't responsible for that). But
internal builds with static linking gave you that for free.

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simion314
Maybe they were using some debug version and maybe bundled 32 and 64 bits in
the same package(I think for OSX had multiarch packaging a few years back when
I was making Qt packages)

I just checked VLC now and the Windows download has 38Mb, Qupzilla installer
has 78Mb(this is a browser so it bundles webkit and probably some js enbine),

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slededit
This was on Windows, and dynamic linking as the project was proprietary. If
you pay the fee or are open source you can static link and it will be much
smaller.

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simion314
I still don't believe that the Qt dlls are 500Mb, I tried to Google around and
what I found is someone complaining of the size, in his case a simple Qt GUI
app had 14Mb. If you think 500Mb is the right number maybe you can find a link
so I update my knowledge.

I am familiar with this complaint , at a previous workpolace we switched to
Adobe AIR because of the installer size (the boss felt better if the customers
installed AIR from Adobe and then our 2 Mb installer). At that time Qt did not
had a built in way to create installers, signing them, and autoupdate
applications,(not sure it has now) Adobe AIR had such mechanism so this also
was a factor on switching to this toolkit then.

So if you think Qt is big what would you use instead?

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slededit
Fifty. Not 500.

You misread my original comment, and the follow up.

I thought you were being smart with 50 megabits in your earlier comment or I
would have caught that misunderstanding earlier.

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simion314
Sorry, I can swear it was 500 but my eyes tricked me.

You did not mention what cross platform tool is smaller and works with
proprietary software.1

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Bayart
I get the irritation about Electron, as it seems my own RAM's "purchasing
power" has melted like snow under the sun thanks to it. But frankly, there's a
wealth of IDEs/editors to pick from. Between vim, emacs, all the Java IDEs,
VS, Sublime and slew of packages every one has... Everybody out there would
have their taste serviced at this point before even thinking of moving to an
Electron-based solution.

Coding workflow is especially latency sensitive and coders are naturally prone
to look for efficiency. I can't feel too sorry for somebody going out of their
way to be inefficient.

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kristianp
It's not just the editor/IDE though. It's also Slack, Discord, spotify,
Skype(embeds a browser), and everything else recently developed, it seems.
This was mentioned in tfa.

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djsumdog
Except for blaming the Javascript language (all language have issues; and
admittedly JS does have a lot of legacy cruft), I generally agree with this
rant.

I have a fancy Ryzen 7 and I do use Atom, but even the small bits of lag here
and there brings me back to, "this is using up a shit ton of resources ... for
a code editor"

Electron apps tend to be at least 50 ~ 60MB in size. Who thought that
packaging a web browser with your app was a good idea? At a minimum, all the
old legacy stuff should be stripped out of the browser and it should only
support the very latest standards in HTML/JS/CSS since you're not worrying
about cross browser support, right? Oh no wait, Slack and Discord pretty much
just pull their web app and cache a bunch of things locally.

Things like Java/Swing, Adobe Air/Flash and other cross-platform app systems
seem to now be a thing of the past. We've settled on Electron, and it's
honestly shit, but what are the alternatives?

Sure there's Python+QT and others, but they do require some packaging and
customer installers for all platforms. That package on Mac/Windows is most
likely going to have its own Python and QT runtime embedded ... but I bet
that'd still take less space than Electron with all its dependencies.

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anoncoward111
I genuinely, truly don't understand why there is so much push for fancy,
resource-hogging web pages when the majority of websites exist just to collect
data from html and store them in csv.

Like, ok, sure you can't port Quake to HTML and csv but you certainly need
1/10th the amount of resources to run Quake compared to say, Discord.

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PascLeRasc
Are you talking about Electron or Dev.to?

