Atom was kinda revolutionary in its plugin support and everything IIRC.
Well, now that Atom has been replaced by VSCode, which is also an electron app, the original Atom devs, or at least some of them, are creating Zed. Zed’s written in Rust and uses a lot less memory.
Of course it’s not yet as mature and they’re trying to earn money by integrating AI and selling that as a service. BUT the AI is voluntary and even if you do want to use it, you don’t have to pay to use their AI (which comes with a free tier if you DO want to use it), you can literally run your own model in ollama.
It’s not perfect, but I love how little RAM it uses compared to VSCode and (shudders) the Jetbrains suite (which I normally love, but hate the RAM and CPU usage, it can drive my computer pretty slow)
Kate my beloved
I use geany btw
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…
Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
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.
I run those thing in the browser, where they belong.
If you have premium, there’s probably a better native client.
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
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.
For Spotify it sort of makes sense though, right? It buffers a few songs ahead of time so using any free RAM seems valid
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.
I don’t think it buffers more than one song ahead right, that would be wasteful?
Really? I have it running right now with 0% CPU usage and around 100MB of memory. Something’s wrong with your setup.
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.
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.
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.
The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that’s buggier and has fewer features.
There is no magic bullet of being like ‘just code the exact same thing in C’. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.
Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.
Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.
It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.
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.
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 vibe-coded performance optimizations
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.
dude just fuckin
curl --data-ram @ram https://downloadmoreram.com/release/20.1until curl rewrites in electon and you don’t have enough ram to run it anymore
“On next week’s episode of whycombinator”
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
back 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.
Is that why everyone’s going to Ram Ranch now? To harvest high-quality RAM right from the source?
Thanks, Calvin’s Dad!
But what if I want more RAM while I am waiting for my additional RAM to download?
await new Promise({of: "ram"})
me still using sublime text
“Just get more ram” isn’t a solution
