Our great sponsors
-
Avalonia
Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
I've been learning game dev recently and I've discovered that the Godot game engine is actually a very capable app builder. It has all the benefits of electron -- accessible to developers, multi platform support -- but it appears the apps are much leaner.
The author mentions the official WhatsApp weighing in at 324 MB. There's an open source WhatsApp clone made in Godot that builds at about 55 MB. Of course with all the media and features of WhatsApp its not a apples to apples, but regardless the results are interesting.
https://github.com/3ddelano/whatsup-godot
Fun fact, Tesla also uses Godot for their mobile app.
Better comparison with WhatsApp instead of ancient text editor would be Telegram app [1] built with Swift and C/C++, given hypertext and rich media that is modern messaging app like Telegram, it is resembles more a subset of web browser functionality rather than text editor, so binaries for this around 235 MB in size.
[1] https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift