> Then Electron came out, making a “hello world” gui app need 800mb of RAM.
By my measurement, that's an order of magnitude too high. My real-world Electron app uses ~77 MB on startup on Windows, across the private working sets of all four processes. Granted, my JS code is relatively lean, but still, we should be charitable, if only because Electron hate is so rampant here.
> Electron makes Java feel light and nimble.
Total rose-colored glasses. Early in my career, in late 2001, I inherited a Java-based desktop app that took so long to start that we made it start looping background music part way through the startup process (it was an audio-based app for blind people, so that was our equivalent of a splash screen). I'm confident that if we developed the same app in Electron today, it would start an order of magnitude faster on today's typical end-user hardware. Some things do get better over time. In this case, bundling of both native and JS code in Electron apps is way ahead of what we had for the JVM in 2002, basically loading lots of little .class files from several .jar files, not to mention multiple native code DLLs as opposed to the Chromium mega-binary. Of course, the JVM world now has NativeImage which is even better, but I don't think anything like that was practically available back then.
By my measurement, that's an order of magnitude too high. My real-world Electron app uses ~77 MB on startup on Windows, across the private working sets of all four processes. Granted, my JS code is relatively lean, but still, we should be charitable, if only because Electron hate is so rampant here.
> Electron makes Java feel light and nimble.
Total rose-colored glasses. Early in my career, in late 2001, I inherited a Java-based desktop app that took so long to start that we made it start looping background music part way through the startup process (it was an audio-based app for blind people, so that was our equivalent of a splash screen). I'm confident that if we developed the same app in Electron today, it would start an order of magnitude faster on today's typical end-user hardware. Some things do get better over time. In this case, bundling of both native and JS code in Electron apps is way ahead of what we had for the JVM in 2002, basically loading lots of little .class files from several .jar files, not to mention multiple native code DLLs as opposed to the Chromium mega-binary. Of course, the JVM world now has NativeImage which is even better, but I don't think anything like that was practically available back then.