Even if memory usage is the same, there's a world of a difference when it comes to executable size, and for most Electron apps, I doubt the content will outweigh the runtime.
Ridiculous. I have a 256 GB hard drive, which is pretty common even on new machines. I’m constantly having to delete stuff to make sure I don’t run out of room. It’s absolutely an issue.
Meh, I have an SSD of similar space, and the only stuff I ever have to delete is old Xcode-related data that refuses to go away. Periodically, some Rust build-related stuff I guess.
The litany of Electron apps don't even come close to being an issue (I arguably have more than the average person, too, thanks to every stupid crypto wallet from the past few years).
I'm hoping you have a 256 GB ssd. In any case lots of bad stuff is common and hoping the universe changes seems like a bad strategy seeing as a 500GB ssd is about $85 and a 500GB hd is like $30.
If you want more future proof a 1TB ssd can be found for around $150.
Unless you're on an Apple laptop. There's no upgrading of the components. And before the "you made the choice" guys start chiming in, some people didn't make that choice. If IT says "Dude, you're getting an Apple", then it is what it is. Just because "hard drives are cheap" is not an excuse to ship bloated software. At some point, the app has the features it is meant to have. At that point, it is a good time to refactor bloated code before proceeding to new features. The bloat will just continue, and eventually cause issues that come to a head.
Sure, but the issue there is the poor value offered by Macs (not hating on Mac, I also use one, but bang for your buck is absurdly low). If you have a non-Mac then you likely have a decent sized hard drive. While electron resource use is not ideal, on modern hardware it really shouldn’t be the issue that it’s being made out to be.
On the practical side, why not do as gp suggests and use an external drive? You’ll likely need additional storage with any of the lower spec’d Macs anyway, electron or not.
Of course I use external storage. USBC->SATA SSD has been amazing. Would love to be able to get a USBC->M.2 for the speed difference. Non-techy people that buy Apple might not though, and they're the ones installing stuff with little concern. It's easy to lose sight of the avg user.
single electron app is not an issue, especially high(ish) quality one (I'm positively surprised by low resource usage of messenger for desktop, I know it loads webapp from the web so local space usage isn't that big but RAM usage is also surprisingly low)
but if you have dozens of these it becomes a struggle even for high end desktops
That's a bold statement. Especially without knowing the full set of facts. In this case, with your stance, you'd be the only computer in the place not on an Apple device. It's a small video/photography shop. Everyone involved uses a Mac including the freelance guys that get hired.
What exactly are proper tools? I'm designing a set of web-based tools to help their day to day operations. Lots of shell scripting and what not to just allow people to drag-n-drop and automagically get things to happen, consistently. Are you saying that the proper tool to write php/css/js/shell scripts/etc can only be found not on a Mac? I have found the world becomes a much easier place to live in if/when you can just accept what is on hand and get the job done. Could it be better? Possibly. Is this my favorite laptop? Nope. Can I do what I've been tasked with to get it done? Absolutely. I'm actually quite thankful that I'm not a one trick pony and I can use pretty much any OS put in front of me.
I can use mac if I'm forced to do but my sanity is worth more than some extra money I can get doing so
and seriously, using slow and noisy machine with poor multitasking and overall terrible UX WILL slow me down considerably, it's not worth it also for employer
and you know what? I've done it before already and been the happy guy in the office laughing at all the trouble people forced to use macs had
EDIT: ofc if I'd know beforehand that mac is the only option I simply wouldn't apply to that place, there's no reason to make your own work lower quality
Excuse me while I laugh my ass off. Looking at the 15" pro with touchbar to name one model it starts at about $2400 with no upgrades. An upgrade to 512 can be had for $200.
In order to be in your position your company had to simultaneously overpay AND underpay. How can you be so cost conscious that you say nah give them the tiny ssd it costs less while shelling out 2400+ per unit
Why are you blaming us as users for a decision made beyond our control? Yes, we "get it" already, Apple is overpriced. I'm really happy for you that you get to decide what gear you use. Rubbing it other peoples faces really makes it better, so thanks for that.
It's opinions like this that cause first day downloads for new games like Red Dead Redemption 2 to be 55GBs.
In the case of an Electron app disk space might not matter as much, but it's absolutely worth optimizing in 2018, at least because not everyone has high speed connections (e.g. in Germany, a lot of infrastructure is built around DSL, which obviously doesn't get great speeds).
You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB. Overall in 2018 that is not a big concern.
In gaming, high definition graphics are going to result in massively larger files. That’s not going to change anytime soon and no gaming company will prioritize a small download over better graphics.
If you have 20 such apps, you use 1% of your 250gb SSD (which is on the way low end) on redundant framework copies, with the benefit that the developer gets to test on the version of Electron you are running.
I don't understand why apps don't download an Electron runtime on launch and store it in a shared location. That way, if apps share a required runtime version, only one copy of that version runtime exists.
Yes I know, and the size of an Electron app versus a AAA game is sometimes 3 orders of magnitude in difference, which is why I pointed out that even a "small" app that's 100MB is still a lot to download on a limited speed connection.
I suspected you meant lossless, but no, Titanfall literally did include 35GB of uncompressed audio. Their reason was to lower the CPU overhead from decompression, which sounds like nonsense to me.
> Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?
How about downloading textures and movies on demand in the background when you enter new areas? It's not like all that stuff is required for the game to start.
Given 55GB of data and the internet speed the average person has, the fact that most users will ultimately need to load most data, and the fact that a huge mass of users will need the data on day one this seems like a bad strategy.
tbh I'd use configurable installer: download only these assets you'll be using
at worst case allow us to set up everything with full version installed and then cleanup
Sure. For the price of increased complexity, you can get something going (and in fact some games do do that, e.g. WoW), but to be clear, you're still downloading 55GB of assets. The game isn't actually any smaller, which is what OP was complaining about.
Also, this is why the big console makers are investing in cloud-consoles.
Hey, that's not fair to RDR2! I actually bought it the day it came out because it _didn't_ have a huge day one patch. I think it was only about 4 GB, which is barely a blip on my ISP's arbitrary data cap. Fallout 76, however, had a patch that was larger than the disc itself, so that was an easy "pass" for me.
Edit: I just checked, and even now that they've added multiplayer to the game (which didn't come on the physical disk), the patch for a new installation of RDR2 is 8 GB. Meanwhile, Fallout 76 is 50 GB and COD:BO4 is 65 GB.
Messages uses webviews and manages to do much of what Slack does with a tenth of the memory footprint. I still have not found any evidence for your claim that Electron and WKWebView use the same amount of memory.
You're literally comparing two completely different apps. If you want to compare Apples to Apples, host 5 teams in Slack, in both Chromium and WKWebView
Unfortunately, I’m in a place where I can test your argument, so the best evidence I can give you is the personal anecdote that I run Slack in Safari rather than using the Electron app for performance reasons. It’s not quite WKWebView, but I think it’s a relatively decent approximation. With that said, I still think you’re missing the point: it’s completely possible to make a messaging app that uses significantly less memory than Slack does and does basically the same things, even if you ditch native controls (which is not something I prefer people do, for reasons other than performance, but it’s something I am willing to tolerate). Loading an entire browser with its associated baggage rather than using the platform’s native web view will almost always use more resources, because you will have bloat that is not necessary for what you are doing and some features will end up being reimplemented in Electron. Just because Slack might perform poorly in both a web view and Electron (which I still believe is not equally poorly), does not mean that it could not perform well at all. There are multiple issues here.
There is of course value in comparing Messages-the-HTML-app to Slack-the-HTML-app. If they can do it in a fraction of the memory with comparable functionality, I wonder why Slack can't
For any sites I could think of, the memory usage, thread count, CPU time, and idle wake ups were considerably smaller using WKWebView.
The disk usage was also crazy smaller, as is expected. ~122MB for nativefier vs ~14MB for WKWebView (and a lot of that is due to being written in Swift).
It really doesn’t. A “Hello, World” WKWebView is a couple of megabytes. The same in an Electron app is hundreds of megabytes.