Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.
Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.
It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible.
ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions.
Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces)
There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would work, I'm not sure if the performance would be substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es and web unfortunately.
So we are where we are :)
> It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible.
Qt is pretty good at this actually. I don’t have a Mac, but building the same codebase for windows, linux, and a wasm target was pretty neat the first time I did it.
I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.
See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It was the indexing which was causing the resource utiliazation.
For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU (maybe continuously indexing)
Fortunately the next generation seems to be CLI based! Maybe we'll go back to native apps in the next generation.
Zed exists.