evaluation VS agenda

https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

8MB vs 42MB for electron. That's pretty real savings IMO!

It's also using the existing shared libraries on your system, so there's a very real chance a lot of this 8MB might be ready resident & take zero additional space. It'd be great to see what the memory impact of launching a second & different app would be!

Personally I think the Electron hate is because people think every Electron app behaves as badly as Slack. Honestly 42MB is not that bad. But it hurts my soul that each app has it's own static copy of the browser, means there is zero chance for sharing. If you are running 2-3 apps it's fine but I want a world where we can potentially have dozens or even a hundred little gui apps running & it works fine, no problem. That would be on par with native apps & this is a clear demonstration of one way we could get there.

The missing next step is that this system launches a mini http/websocket server to run. It'd be interesting to explore using a lightweight Sandboxing multi vm to host apps on, might make the server side lighter weight too. Wasm, or cloudflare's workerd... The CRI folk have been busy building support for managing work let like things like this, & desktop could definitely pull some wins, now that folks like Neutralinojs and Tauri are starting to do better at desktop webapps.

I'd say the lower RAM usage is a bigger deal than the actual app size. Here are some basic comparisons: https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

Side note: There's alternatives to electron that are ultra light weight. Neutralinojs is one I've been keeping an eye on. The proof exists that it's possible to make performant web apps run native.

Last year I built a very simple task management tool for myself, where I am building the binary like this [1].

In retrospect I would probably go with an extra "cmds" folder to have multiple build variants, but it is easy to follow the code like it is built right now.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/agenda