Look at Discord app. Look at Slack. Or any other Electron bloatware. The executable is .1GB big minimum, and eats memory because it first has to start a browser.
Oh, and none of these browsers share memory or anything, so you get X copies of the same thing.
It's the "like" that is the significant detail here.
> You must be 10 years old!
I disagree with your assessment therefore I'm stupid? immature? I hope this was an unusually abusive moment for you, and you don't generally treat folks this way.
Yeah, calling someone a child is pretty immature. So lets focus on hard numbers, no?
I'm currently on IRC using HexChat. I'm in 6 different IRC rooms, with 2 being 500+ users and lively discussion. I'm using 27.8MB ram and since execution 2 seconds of CPU time total. It doesn't do inline images or frillies like what Slack does, but that's what links are for.
Electron-ized IRC is a magnitude more CPU and ram than a native application. This is a waste of my resources and time, so that a developer can be significantly lazy in doing some 'app'.
Of course, the upside is that using electron allows targeting linux/windows/mac. That's not trivial either, however, the resource costs of running X chrome backends is not negligible. With much of the heavier processing I do (RF hacking), this would never work with any sort of acceptable timings or throughput.
> the upside is that using electron allows targeting linux/windows/mac
The more significant upside is that you can add features to an electron app 10x faster than to a C app, and non-technical users care about features (inline images and frillies, etc) more than they care about RAM efficiency
My intention was not calling you a "boy", but more an assumption, that you may not have been around when IRC was used instead of Slack & Co. Because then you'd not be so easy going about wasting so much memory (RAM, storage) for an app, that, basically, allows you to chat.
Slightly off-topic here, but I'm fairly sure that if you think an Electron app takes only 80 MB of RAM, you're probably miscalculating how much does it really use.
Modern programs (or apps as they seem to be called now) are like gasses, they expand to fill the volume of their containers. Even if we keep getting more RAM, does that mean that it should take more memory to play music or edit text? Yes, being pragmatic maybe 503 MB out of 24 GB isn't a big deal, but it would be if you had 4 GB, which should be plenty to run an OS and a text editor. Then there's the question of how elegant it is to gobble up so much memory for the benefit of the programmers to use even more abstractions and virtual machines and frameworks. Programs are written once and run lots of times, it makes sense to optimize for the user, not the programmer.
HUGE MISTAKE, HUGE MISTAKE. I would like to retract, It's 503MB.
Still, I find that perfectly acceptable.
I went to Best Buy's website, and saw the best sold machines.
There's one that's really cheap ($229) and comes with 4GB's, definitively not a productivity machine.
Then there's an HP for $399 that comes with 8GB. Another for $100 more with 12GB.
I filtered out for laptops with more than 8GB, brand new (not refurbs), and you can get a 8GB complete machine for just $379.99, that's less than many popular phones out there (and I'm not talking about Apple products).
I get it, some people live in poor countries, I live in a relatively poor country (Portugal). And I know how this might sound like. But you are programming, you are not sheltering, feeding, or helping people. You are working for big $$$ corporations. Like any worker, you should ask for fees that at least cover your equipment costs.
Remember that 0.5GB is 6.25% of a modern computer's memory.
Back in the C64 days, you bought a 64KB machine for less $$$ in the 80's, than those computers today, and after boot up, and BASIC, and it only had 38911 bytes free out of the 65536 bytes. So, only 59% free.
Back when computers had 1MB of RAM (early 90's), anyone can point me, to an editor that only costed 62.5KB of RAM? I think I'm not going to find it... unless it's just notepad.exe.
Etc. etc. etc.
The problem is that people, for some reason, started to think they need a new phone, for leisure, every 2 years (in some richer countries, it's 12 months), and a new PC, a tool for work, only every 10 years. And that the phone can cost $1000 and it's okay, and the PC, cannot cost more than $500 or it's "overpriced". I think it's ridiculous.
My VSC with a file open sits at 80 megs... I think my 24GB machine can handle it.