Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

@jdp23 Cwtch is 'just' built on Tor, right? I'm particularly looking for novel network designs, consensus mechanisms, actual networks, that sort of thing, that try to advance the state of research in P2P systems, rather than applications built on existing systems.

@hye It does! Though I've already read that one 🙂 Thanks nevertheless!

@aeva Oh no 😬

@petrichor From your description that sounds like it fits :)

@artemist @ZeroEcks Note that Electron also does sandboxing by default and it's generally a choice of the publisher of the software to explicitly turn that off (for a variety of reasons, most of them bad)

@smveerman Ah, no, that looks like a query for some search backend like ElasticSearch, a boolean query language basically

@freakazoid Some pointers to that end: the actual thing that Electron uses is CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework, which can more or less be thought of as "just the engine part of Chromium without all the other browser stuff" (ie. mostly just layout, parsing, and an embedded JS runtime, similar to modern UI toolkits), the baseline memory use of Electron is somewhere in the region of 50MB at most, V8 is a very fast and well-optimized JS runtime (achieving close to C performance in some cases... and often better performance in typical I/O-bound scenarios), and most of the 'memory use' of both V8 and the rendering subsystem are optimistic memory allocations/retaining that are not actually used yet to prevent memory fragmentation, and which disappears under memory pressure.

@freakazoid Like, all of these claims are literally just false, but nobody ever bothers to actually *check* them before repeating them.

@freakazoid "But isn't resource usage (not to mention download size) going to be high in Electron pretty much no matter what you do?"

Short answer: no, it's not. Electron does not have 'high resource usage' and never did.

"It's just that using a full-blown browser for each application"

Electron isn't a "full-blown browser" and this is very much part of the misinformation that is causing all this bullshit. Its internal complexity is not meaningfully higher than that of a modern UI toolkit, and it's not Chromium either.

@ZeroEcks Honestly you can just use the system Electron for like 95% of Electron apps in my experience without anything meaningfully breaking, I've been doing that for years, the whole "shipping an Electron with every application" was more of an invention by tech companies because they didn't want to deal with package managers, originally it was meant to be used with a system runtime much like Node

@ZeroEcks Oh yeah, there are certainly valid criticisms to be directed at Electron. But crucially those are never the ones that people actually bring up, and the people complaining about Electron are *also* never the ones willing to contribute to getting the remaining issues fixed.

@freakazoid (Do note that at the time of introduction of Electron, CSS and versions thereof were not actually a thing in other UI toolkits - that only came much later, and even then usually in a much more restricted and janky form)

@freakazoid It's not. The goal of Electron, especially of the broader community originally around it, was to make the frankly just better application design tooling of browsers (CSS in particular) available for desktop development, because historically UI toolkits, especially the cross-platform ones, have sucked shit (and in many ways still do).

It's just that capitalists saw this as a way to cut costs.