Wanted to get some opinions from folks here that have actually built and shipped with Electron.
Background: Building an API IDE on Electron. Designing this to not be “just an API client”or a thin wrapper around a webapp. It’s a pretty original desktop tool with a lot of editor/IDE-like behavior: local workflows, richer interactions, and some things that I think would have been much harder to build and maintain in a more constrained setup. So yeah, thats why we went for Electron.
this is the tool: github.com/voidenhq/voiden :)
Now, as adoption is growing, we are starting to get the usual questions about memory footprint and app size.
The (slightly) frustrating part is that when the app is actually being used, the app-side memory is often pretty reasonable. In many normal cases we are seeing something like 50–60 MB for the actual usage we care about (even added it in the app itself for people to check it out).
But then people open Activity Monitor, see all the Chromium/Electron-related processes, and the conversation immediately becomes:
“yeah but Tauri would use way less”
And then, without realizing, I suddenly end up talking and philosophizing about Electron, instead of discussing the tool itself (which is what I am passionate about :)
Of course Electron also has overhead. Pretending otherwise would be foolish. So we are constantly optimizing what we can, and we will keep doing so…
At the same time, I do feel that a lot of these comparisons feel weirdly flattened. For example people often compare:
full Electron process footprint VS the smallest possible Tauri/native mental model
…without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others. Which is by the way the reason that we went with Electron.
So all this context to get to my real question, which is:
How do you explain this tradeoff to users in a way that feels honest and understandable, without sounding like you are making excuses for Electron?
And also, for those of you who have had this conversation a hundred times already:
What do you say when people reduce the whole discussion to “Electron bad, Tauri good”?
Have you found a good way to explain footprint in practical terms?
Mostly trying to learn how others think about this , especially those who have built more serious desktop products and had to answer these questions in the wild.
I think some of what is offensive about the Electron situation is that way too many Electron apps are things that live in the tray or try to hijack the application lifecycle. So these are not just burning up memory but they are burning up memory for some trivial thing in the tray and making your machine slow to boot and complicating UI for the tray.
Hello,
Wanted to get some opinions from folks here that have actually built and shipped with Electron.
Background: Building an API IDE on Electron. Designing this to not be “just an API client”or a thin wrapper around a webapp. It’s a pretty original desktop tool with a lot of editor/IDE-like behavior: local workflows, richer interactions, and some things that I think would have been much harder to build and maintain in a more constrained setup. So yeah, thats why we went for Electron.
this is the tool: github.com/voidenhq/voiden :)
Now, as adoption is growing, we are starting to get the usual questions about memory footprint and app size.
The (slightly) frustrating part is that when the app is actually being used, the app-side memory is often pretty reasonable. In many normal cases we are seeing something like 50–60 MB for the actual usage we care about (even added it in the app itself for people to check it out).
But then people open Activity Monitor, see all the Chromium/Electron-related processes, and the conversation immediately becomes:
“yeah but Tauri would use way less”
And then, without realizing, I suddenly end up talking and philosophizing about Electron, instead of discussing the tool itself (which is what I am passionate about :)
Of course Electron also has overhead. Pretending otherwise would be foolish. So we are constantly optimizing what we can, and we will keep doing so…
At the same time, I do feel that a lot of these comparisons feel weirdly flattened. For example people often compare:
full Electron process footprint VS the smallest possible Tauri/native mental model
…without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others. Which is by the way the reason that we went with Electron.
So all this context to get to my real question, which is:
How do you explain this tradeoff to users in a way that feels honest and understandable, without sounding like you are making excuses for Electron? And also, for those of you who have had this conversation a hundred times already:
What do you say when people reduce the whole discussion to “Electron bad, Tauri good”?
Have you found a good way to explain footprint in practical terms?
Mostly trying to learn how others think about this , especially those who have built more serious desktop products and had to answer these questions in the wild.
Would love your thoughts and advice,
I think some of what is offensive about the Electron situation is that way too many Electron apps are things that live in the tray or try to hijack the application lifecycle. So these are not just burning up memory but they are burning up memory for some trivial thing in the tray and making your machine slow to boot and complicating UI for the tray.