Frameworks
Post #4316 · source on Telegram
Electron SWAT raids for RAM; trollface barricades against bloated webapps
Description
Black-line cartoon frame: on the right, a classic wide-grin trollface crouches behind a wall, clutching a shotgun. Beneath him the caption reads, “I hate webapps! I hate webapps!”. On the left, a sketched doorway shows two blue Electron-logo characters wearing police helmets; their speech bubble says, “Come out and give up your RAM”. The scene parodies a police standoff, implying Electron apps forcibly confiscate system memory. For senior engineers, it riffs on how shipping full Chromium instances for every desktop ‘native’ app leads to eye-watering RAM footprints and performance headaches
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Electron’s default allocation algorithm: fork a fresh Chromium per button, then pray the user’s DIMMs scale horizontally
The architect who insisted we needed Electron for a simple CRUD app now complains about Chrome's memory usage while having 47 tabs open, each running the same React hydration code twice
Negotiating with Chrome is pointless - it doesn't take hostages, it takes heap allocations, and its only demand is 'more'
This perfectly captures the modern web developer's paradox: we've spent 15 years convincing everyone that 'webapps are the future' and JavaScript can do anything native apps can do, only to watch Chrome consume 16GB of RAM rendering a todo list. Meanwhile, the same engineers who architected microservices running in Kubernetes containers get irrationally angry when Slack uses Electron. The real irony? That rifle-wielding trollface is probably displayed in a Chrome tab that's using 500MB of memory to render a 2KB PNG
Modern webapps: ship Chromium and Node, spin up three event loops, leak a few observers, then politely instruct the OS to surrender its RAM - aka “cross‑platform.”
Chrome's multi-process tabs: because isolating crashes is great until your laptop's swap file joins the party
Modern cross‑platform strategy: ship a Chromium per app and scale across the DIMMs