Electron: Haha, JavaScript Go Brrr
Description
A 'Haha, X Go Brrr' Wojak meme format satirizing the debate between native and web-based desktop applications. On the left, a crying, glasses-wearing Wojak character with a bowtie yells, 'NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! YOU CAN'T ADAPT WEB TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE DESKTOP AND SACRIFICE BOTH MEMORY AND PERFORMANCE FOR CROSS-PLATFORM APPLICATIONS!!!!! YOU ARE RUINING NATIVE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND DETRACTING FROM OTHER CROSS-PLATFORM UI INITIATIVES AHHHHHHHHHHHHH'. On the right, a calm, smug-looking Wojak character replies, 'haha javascript go brrr', standing next to the ElectronJS logo. This meme humorously captures the frustration of native development purists who prioritize performance and resource efficiency, against the pragmatic reality that JavaScript-based frameworks like Electron are widely adopted for their ease of use and cross-platform capabilities, despite their well-known performance overhead. The joke is that logical arguments are often irrelevant in the face of market momentum and developer convenience. A small watermark for t.me/dev_meme is in the bottom left
Comments
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Some engineers spend years optimizing native code for a 5ms performance gain. Electron developers just ship a whole browser and tell users to buy more RAM. Guess who gets to market faster?
We spent a decade shaving 20 ms off backend latency, then shipped the UI as an Electron app that drags a full Chrome instance onto every laptop - apparently our new horizontal-scaling strategy is “deploy the datacenter to the client.”
The same engineers complaining about Electron's 8GB memory footprint are running 47 Docker containers to serve a static blog because "microservices are more scalable."
The eternal Electron paradox: spend 6 months building a native Qt application that uses 50MB of RAM, or spend 2 weeks shipping an Electron app that uses 500MB but actually ships before the product pivot. The market has spoken, and apparently it said 'haha javascript go brrrr' while your perfectly optimized C++ codebase collects dust in the native-apps-that-never-launched graveyard
Electron: Cross-platform native? Nah, just ship V8 and let SREs sweat the 2GB idle tabs
Electron: write once, run everywhere - by shipping ‘everywhere’ with your app; each window gets its own Chrome, and the scaling strategy is to borrow the user’s RAM
Electron optimizes for org charts, not CPUs: one codebase, per‑app Chromium, and the performance bill charged to users’ RAM