me still using sublime text
Same, though I’ve started having some issues with their slower updates not catching up to changes on OSs and stuff (using it on an atomic distro for example is quite a pain).
still nothing better than no sync accounts aside from a simple git repo for packages and user settings to share config across computers :) love the simplicity
If there’s any upside to the entire situation, it’s that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Some of the greatest games ever developed for consoles were great because the developers had to get extremely creative with the limited resources at their disposal. This led to some incredibly optimized games that could do a whole lot with those very limited resources.
You don’t even need to go that far back. It blows my mind that the 360 and PS3 have 512mb of RAM. Halo 4, GTA 5, and The Last of Us did some impressive graphics work with 512mb.
tbf, the PC version of console games of the time ran like utter shit on computers with less than 2GB RAM and graphics cards worse than a Geforce 9800. A lot of people were still on WinXP, which was bloated compared to WinME-2000, but by 2006 it was fine.
Oh wow my mind is blown. Even more so that it’s 256mb of DRAM and 256mb of VRAM separately.
We have really gone down hill and fast ;(
In my brain memory I find it hard to believe all the textures loaded at one time could ever be so small. Im amazed.
Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.
My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.
I always care about how much memory I end up using.
Problem is, most places won’t pay for caring about that. Those that would, are doing so because they are using the product on their own systems instead of some customer’s systems.I think we will first see a batch of alternative apps, which either will get shut down by manufacturers etc., or get tolerated as an alternative.
I’m not sure I know many Electron apps that are worth running.
There is WhatsApp, but I just run the browser version. For Matrix, there’s NeoChat, which uses QML and is definitely better than Electron.I think spotify / discord / vscode (and derivatives) / slack are probably the most installed electron apps.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=v&SO=d&PP=50&submit=Go
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=p&SO=d&PP=50&submit=GoA lot of pretty popular packages in those lists are electron apps, unfortunately
android-studio: I guess that explains why it ran so badly back when I had to use it for work.
jdkwouldn’t be an Electron app, right?discordis the only 1 of those that I used in any meaningful sense before and I already stopped using it for reasons other than Electron. So, I guess it’s just a personal thing that I don’t tend to require stuff that is made in Electron.I believe Android Studio is built on top of IntelliJ IDE which uses Java, so no Electron. That being said, Java applications are generally RAM heavy as well and Android Studio was always a pig on resources.
Visual Studio Code (not Visual Studio!) is Electron based but I’ve always had good performance with it.
Visual Studio Code
Yeah, that’s one that I can’t talk badly about.
While I have used MS Visual Studio and know how slow it was, I tried VS Codium once or twice and it worked pretty smoothly. Someone probably put quite a bit of effort into making it so.Apart from Android Studio, which ended up not even starting up properly on the work computer, Gradle itself also takes quite a bit of time and resources. I was using the NDK with a C++ project and it took way longer to setup than any BSP, despite only being able to compile for a single version of Android.
If there’s any upside to the entire situation, it’s that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Amen.
Long time irked that so many developers fail with the mathematics of the situation.
If hardware multiplies its resources 1000x, that does not mean you can make your program use 1000x resources, along with thousands of other developers failing at that mathematics too, making bloat radically outpace Moore’s Law.
If hardware multiplies its resources 1000x, that should mean that developers continue to keep their software tight, lean, and fast, and that should mean users have 1000x more resources available to do more with.
*Dreamer*
The upside to the situation is that electron has been a more successful cross platform development framework then literally anything that came before it, from Xamarin to Java. And it’s entirely based on open source software, and open web standards.
I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won’t let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.
I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won’t ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won’t be fixed.
dude just fuckin
curl --data-ram @ram https://downloadmoreram.com/release/20.1back in the day people would download more ram and put it on giant tape-based backup systems. Big companies started downloading massive amounts of high quality ram this way. This created a ram shortage, and companies like corsair are now using their massive reserves of downloaded ram and filling empty ram sticks with them and making lots of money. That’s why ram is so expensive today. Any ram you can download today is low quality ram, and the only high quality ram can be had on physical sticks, which were filled by the companies with ram reserves. 1969 was the peak of the ram harvesting, so you’ll probably get some really great ram if it came from that year.
Thanks, Calvin’s Dad!
Is that why everyone’s going to Ram Ranch now? To harvest high-quality RAM right from the source?
until curl rewrites in electon and you don’t have enough ram to run it anymore
according to string theory, you can see the string that started the universe with
cat ~/.zsh_history | head -n 1switch it to bash_history to see the real big bang
*hashbang
“On next week’s episode of whycombinator”
But what if I want more RAM while I am waiting for my additional RAM to download?
await new Promise({of: "ram"})
Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
Kinda depressing what numbers are considered impressive these days.
Who knows, maybe this dram scarcity will cause a change of heart and make people optimise more again. :)
The bubble will pop before that
Why would they? Ram hasn’t been a problem for more than a decade relating to UI.
Electron apps being 500MB simply isnt a problem. People aren’t loading 15 seperate instances, at most power users are loading like 3.
Nobody’s mentioning the system monitor taking 227MiB?
Jesus Christ, Steam at 1.4 GB and you are expected to run that WHILE PLAYING GAMES? That made my eyes pop outta my head.
There’s no way that’s normal. I’m pretty sure mine only uses a couple hundred.
For real, I remember when an entire game being over a 20 MiB made me hesitate to download it because it’d take a while.
This is why I always run my personal projects through upx
The Half Life demo was 50MB. Took me 4 tries to get it over dialup. Played till the sun came up!
I remember the stories my father told me of his early dev days… “so the mainframe we wrote the whole national social security system for had 8K of RAM”.
Mine too. war stories of 16k of RAM and 20MB hard disk drives the size of washing machines.
Linux wins again. Still runs on same hardware as 10 years ago. :) No forced updates by any big corp.
In terms of performance yeah. Though not every old device keeps working. You’re still vulnerable to driver support for newer kernels. My old Thinkpad no longer functions properly because the Nvidia drivers are not compatible with newer kernels. I can either have an unsafe machine that runs fine or an up-to-date machine that can barely open a web browser.
Nvidia yeah. The source of many many linux issues.
I struck lucky. Never had any issues with nvidia on linux in all my >2 decades using linux.
Still prefer AMD though. Straight through.
Yeah I got amd graphics 3 years ago and the same day, all those weird issues with graphics artifacts or suspend bugs just went away.
If you didnt have any of those, you are Indeed lucky. I had many of them through the years.
Electron apps are on Linux too
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
Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.
Discord similarly is an affront.
For Spotify it sort of makes sense though, right? It buffers a few songs ahead of time so using any free RAM seems valid
I don’t think it buffers more than one song ahead right, that would be wasteful?
The average spotify 3:40 song is going to be about 4MB. This only changes to triple (10MB at the same length for premium and high quality) that size when you pay for it.
If Spotify is using more than 50MB on the audio cache, they absolutely deserve to get ragged on for it.
Ah true, that is pretty bad then
I use discord.com/app for exactly this reason. Its footprint is lower and the experience is almost exactly the same. And I can block things I don’t like using ublock/other extensions, like animated reactions and those crazy new premium video profiles with explosions and confetti etc
God I wish discord just stuck to being a straightforward app without any of the fancy fluff that’s just not needed. I hate the super-flashy things that obscure visibility and divert your attention so much
But it’s what they sell to people, and a minority seems to really like so
They had no viable business plan with which to pay back investors so this was inevitable. It sucks though…not a day goes by where I don’t grumble about what an insult Discord is to their users.
I can recommend Vencord or Vesktop instead, it’s a modified client with stuff like FakeNitro and Adblocker as plugins
Really? I have it running right now with 0% CPU usage and around 100MB of memory. Something’s wrong with your setup.
I run those thing in the browser, where they belong.
If you have premium, there’s probably a better native client.
Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.
If you have Spotify Premium, try a third party client. Even GUI clients like Spotify-qt are memory light [though not at feature parity] whilst terminal clients like ncspot, spotify-player take 1/10th the memory. The latter even supports Spotify connect.
Thank you for his hint.
don’t worry, this will all be solved now with incompetent vibe-coders, just give it a while
or you will look back to this with a nostalgic tear in the eye. one of these.
Correction, Winamp still does this today while using a fraction of the resources.
Though if you’re on Windows I’d recommend Xmplay instead, it plays basically everything.
I’m on Linux and I use VLC.
Have you tried AIMP on Windows? If so, how does it compare with Xmplay?
don’t use winamp, use wacup
on linux use audacious
Why
Bunch of people complaining about electron in this thread but I’m happy it exists.
Without electron you would get way fewer Linux apps and often no GUI to go with them.
The RAM usage is high sometimes but I have 128gb and unused RAM is wasted RAM. I don’t care how much something is using until it starts to swap or gets oom.
Most people still only have 16gb of ram (like me).
Electron is net good, but only for small teams that need to ship fast or solo devs etc who already know js and just want something to work.
Billion dollar companies using it instead of paying more for native apps is a horrible use case (that’s mainly where my complaints live).
At the very least, I hope we move to something that can use webviews on our system rather than bundling their own which would save on resources (but opens the possibility for version mismatches i guess, I dunno if you can “peg” that sorta stuff to a working version… but i guess thats just how browsers work so…).
GTK and Qt exists. They’re multi-platform, so you don’t even need to port.
Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol
… Now got the idea of doing lemmy through Emacs.
There’s probably a mode for that.
… ah, there’s one… https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el
Looking pretty good right now. ;D
Kate my beloved
My gripe with Kate is that whenever I open a file and get an LSP error it displays a pulsing warning notification in the lower left of the window. This might be okay except that I cannot read things if something is moving in my peripheral vision and there is also apparently no way to suppress this pulsing warning notification other than to disable the LSP features entirely. I want to use kwrite because at that point I might as well, but there is a long-standing bug in plasma that causes Kate to be defaulted to over kwrite for some file types despite my preferences!
I still prefer this to vscode, but I just need to vent a bit
Notepad++ my beloved
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…Iirc you can create custom syntax highlighting formats for notepad++. So if it’s not there by default, someone else might have made a file for it, or you can start making one yourself, as the format was easy to understand. It’s been like a decade since I’ve used it, but it should be somewhere in the menus.
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)
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.
Did you ever use Atom?
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.
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?
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?
I will concede on the “not really an IDE” part. You’re right you can set it up to be like one.
I say it’s not mostly because it isn’t marketed as one. It’s marketed as just a source code (text) editor.
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.
In my experience VSCode on Windows runs like dogshit. I blame Windows for that. VSCode on Linux runs like a dream. I can have four different sessions open and it still runs great (I haven’t tested more than that because I’ve never had a reason to).
I can confirm this has been my experience as well.
Anectdotally, the only people I know who say vscode is lightweight and snappy are devs that have have primarily used it, visual studio, jet brains, or some other common and bloated application.
Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao
Drawing strong conclusions like ‘VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product’, from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.
Electron is the abomination, not VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs are developed by… JetBrains, not Oracle.
+1
For stuff like editing massive files or huge folders, the least stuttery, fastest IDE for me is… VScode. Jetbrains (last I tried it) is awful.
Code may not use 1MB of RAM or idle dead asleep, but it utilizes the CPU/GPU efficiently.
Now, extensions are the caveat, like any app that supports extensions. Those can bog it down real quick.
“Just get more ram” isn’t a solution
LOL.
Enjoyable little irony personally for me, as when I asked an LLM to churn out a readme for my fin project ( posted on lemmy here ), it proposed one of fin’s advantages that could push fin into the notable category: “Performance niche - might be faster than Electron-based editors for simple tasks”. Maybe I should change that to “save a fortune on RAM compared to Electron-based editors”.
