Electron is far from ideal, and it may be argued it's incredibly difficult to make a relatively efficient Electron app (vscode is often cited as one, but Microsoft has plenty of resources).
However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely poorly written app, and just the canonical example of overengineered inefficiency in general.
Slack Web, for example, also does similarly draconian things to my CPU.
Similarly, Riot.im—probably the most comparable app to Slack functionality-wise—is also built in Electron. It has some of the performance problems one would expect from any Electron app, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slack (and has a much much smaller development team with much tighter resources).
In short: Electron may not be ideal, but it seems to get an unfairly bad name from Slack; we should be laying the criticism with the Slack dev team rather than with the Electron one.
However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely poorly written app, and just the canonical example of overengineered inefficiency in general.
Slack Web, for example, also does similarly draconian things to my CPU.
Similarly, Riot.im—probably the most comparable app to Slack functionality-wise—is also built in Electron. It has some of the performance problems one would expect from any Electron app, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slack (and has a much much smaller development team with much tighter resources).
In short: Electron may not be ideal, but it seems to get an unfairly bad name from Slack; we should be laying the criticism with the Slack dev team rather than with the Electron one.