While at it: can somebody please tell me what makes the modern Web so heavyweight? Why is my Firefox process consuming so many hundreds of megs? Why GMail can peg a whole CPU core?
Apparently Qt is not significantly better: a Telegram client consumes about 400 MB, and a Qt-based music player Strawberry, about 100 MB.
I can imagine that GPU-based compositing can consume a lot of RAM for the textures used in rendering, but frankly an entire 4K screen at 32bpp is less than 32 MB, while both Telegram and Strawberry take up a small portion of it.
Or, from another angle: can a modern GUI be made to consume little RAM while remaining performant and using a GPU for rendering on larger / high-DPI surfaces?
Why do you consider Telegram heavy, if it takes 400MB of memory? Isn't memory there to be used? I just checked my telegram client, and it takes up 600MB of memory, but the system has almost 4GB of free memory. Why should telegram limit itself to using only, lets say, 50MB of memory, if there is much more available?
I just started telegram inside a Windows 10 VM, to check if Telegram actually needs that much memory. In my VM with 1024MB of RAM, the Telegram client uses only around 45MB. If the system gets 2048MB of RAM, Telegram will use around 160MB, if available. The client still works fine. Probably a lot slower, but it works fine.
I think your comment is misguided. The Telegram client is not heavy-weight. It just uses the ressources you machine provides it, giving you better performance.
hmmm, just opened Strawberry in Heaptrack. Here it uses 46 megabytes at most. 20 megabytes of those are icons it seems, and 5 megabytes seem to be some kerfuffle with Qt's stylesheets which don't seem to be super optimized (although I wouldn't be surprised if it's image loading here too).
Apparently Qt is not significantly better: a Telegram client consumes about 400 MB, and a Qt-based music player Strawberry, about 100 MB.
I can imagine that GPU-based compositing can consume a lot of RAM for the textures used in rendering, but frankly an entire 4K screen at 32bpp is less than 32 MB, while both Telegram and Strawberry take up a small portion of it.
Or, from another angle: can a modern GUI be made to consume little RAM while remaining performant and using a GPU for rendering on larger / high-DPI surfaces?