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Show HN: Clippy (Clone) – As Electron app: 165mb; as Sciter app: 6mb (not typo) (github.com/girkovarpa)
2 points by GirkovArpa on Nov 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



I thought it would be nice to have a concrete example of the same app made with Electron versus Sciter.

So I cloned Clipper (https://github.com/AkashRajpurohit/clipper) in Sciter to the best of my ability.

The original as an Electron app is 165mb.

In contrast, the Sciter release is only 6mb (3mb compressed).

I used Quark (Sciter's version of electron-builder) to pack the program's resources into a single file, and here is the result: https://github.com/GirkovArpa/clipper-sciter/releases (I've only packaged for Windows at the moment).

Actually it didn't pack the .mp3 files for some reason so I just zipped those up with the executable.

Not only is the filesize a magnitude of order lighter, but it starts up way faster and without an empty grey window at the beginning.

Some caveats:

- I haven't copied the button click waves effect from here: https://materializecss.com/waves.html (yet).

- I haven't implemented the tray icon (yet).

- Popups which are supposed to be hidden offscreen until activated can be scrolled into view when the list of clipboard history is long enough. I intend to fix this as soon as I can and have posted a question about it in the official Sciter forums here: https://sciter.com/forums/topic/position-absolute-bottom-0-d...

I would like to emphasize that this is my attempt at a clone but it's not a port. Since the original Clippy is written in React, a genuine port would utilize Sciter's "Reactor".


How does memory usage compare? That is more important to me than executable size.


According to Task Manager, the Electron version has 5 processes for a total 80mb memory. The Sciter version has 1 process for a total 15mb memory.

According to Process Hacker, Electron had "Peak Private Bytes" of 522mb. Sciter had 35mb.

I am not sure exactly what those numbers refer to, but I hope it answers your question.




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