alt Hacker NewsCoincidentally, I just got angry this weekend about my Mac with 64GB of RAM going OOM because of poorly optimized applications. Use of web tech, especially Electron, was common among basically all of the offending applications. Whether Electron itself or just poor coding, I'm not sure, but there's a pattern.
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claude-code is using a suspicious amount of memory and doesn't seem to care about optimizing it nearly as much as the others.
Electron's more-or-less just Chrome without... erm... chrome, so it makes sense that it's bloated and uses too much RAM. Even well-constructed and efficient JavaScript executed through it will do so on top of a bunch of stuff your application might not even need.
One thing that I really hope we see out of the LLM revolution: a return to native applications. You could argue that Electron cross-platform apps made sense when you had to pay a team to maintain two or three (at least) native clients; you can't make that argument anymore when the marginal cost of a line of code is $0.00.
Electron needs to die.
But it's convenient. I can't really fault people for using it.