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RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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If there's any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
If there’s any silver lining to this, fuck JavaScript, fuck JavaScript wrappers and fuck all people picked JavaScript for the programming language of anything cross-platform.
It’s unbelievable I would need 6 gbs of RAM to say a simple “hello” to my friends. It used to take 300kb with IRC.
that has very little to do with JavaScript though 🤷♂️
Maybe not Javascript as a language, but the framework it requires to get applications written with it running, which is a lot. And in a roundabout way, it kinda has a little to do with the language itself, as the reason electron got so popular in the first place is because it catered to web developers who either couldn't be bothered or couldn't figure out proper desktop app devlopment, so they went with the easy short-term path. And Javascript kinda is an easy language to pick up and write simple.projects in - now, maintaining more complex applications with it is another story.,.
It has less to do with JavaScript as most people tend to think IMO. JavaScript does not require Electron to exist, it's rather the other way around. The fact that Electron ships a whole browser is the culprit and you could even argue that V8 is bloated as well, though I'm not sure how efficient it is built and how much size it takes. Browsers historically need to support so much legacy stuff which is another main factor for its size. I really hope for stuff like Tauri or Servo to gain traction.
Not really, no. It's very compact compared to Python, Java or most anything in the same league. A compiled program would be smaller, of course, and Lua is minuscule next to anything — but otherwise V8 is small and fast. Iirc Node.js takes something like 30 MB out of the box, including its modules and libraries.
Even Electron apps aren't necessarily ram hoarders: Stretchly, which is a break reminder and thus needs to always run in the background, takes something like 20 or 40 MB of memory.