I have MS Teams and VS Code, both Electron apps, open and they seem perfectly OK to me - in fact I am surprised by how little memory they use.

That's because Electron has conditioned you to enormous waste of memory, and cpu, bigger latencies, and so on.

The "[surprising] little memory they use" is huge for what they do.

Well, Teams is using less memory than Skype for Business that I also have running and compared to Visual Studio and multiple browsers windows I have open they are hardly using anything.

Edit: Yes, I think Electron/nodejs are "bloated" too if I look in node_modules - but once I stopped worrying about that I got over the whole "bloated" perception.

Ive never had the experience of teams feeling like it was performing well or felt fast. It's probably the laggiest apps in the Office suite.

You've never experienced Skype for Business, it's awfully slow when doing simple things (resizing the window, opening a new conversation, sending a message, etc.)

oh i have. im not saying skype was better, but parts of its UI were absolutely more responsive.

it wasnt slow scrolling up the conversation to see what someone said 10 minutes ago. try scrolling up a teams conversation to find a recent message.

I have a directory open and edit a 260 line file.

roughly 750MB RAM...

> People used to fret about emacs being "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"

People used to edit code on a 1 MIPS 8MB 32BIT DEC VAX 11/780.

With 30 people doing the same, concurrently.

> I'm running all this stuff on a beefy desktop - I don't really care if it takes 200MB RAM to open a file as VC Code has lots of features I really like.

I have a bunch of machines. From ARM boards, ARM-based gadgets, Intel-based ultra-light laptop to a beefy Intel-based desktop.

If a tool runs a text editor editing a small file in 3/4 GB RAM, what will it do if the technology is used to develop some actually demanding things?

That's a narrow view point. You as a developer have a "beefy" desktop. What about your users? Most people in the world don't have "beefy" desktops. These days, 2GB and 4GB machines are still the norm.

I don't expect end users to have VS Code or VS Studio and things are tested in end-user appropriate environments? I don't see what development tools and target environments have to do with each other - 'bloat' in the latter does not necessarily mean bloat in the deliverable?

Edit: I've worked with people in my career who complained about 'bloat' in C (vs assember), C++ (vs C), Unix, Emacs (vs vi), Java (vs C++)

Complaining about the latest round of tools being bloated is just what a subset of the developer community does at any moment in time (and this is not necessarily a bad thing).

But developers do expect them to run the crapware that they "develop", such as Slack, Spotify, etc., which are often worse than VSCode. Neither should be acceptable.

> I've worked with people in my career who complained about 'bloat' in C (vs assember), C++ (vs C), Unix, Emacs (vs vi), Java (vs C++)

That's a big hyperbole.

I don't find that VS Code does much out of the box that I couldn't do with Geany or Notepad++. It's all in the plugins for any of these text editors. VS Code is probably the most performant Electron app I've ever seen, but it's floor is about 10x the native apps, because it has a whole damned sand-boxed browser running in it.