Launcher sunset - 2019.1 alpha 10+

After a quick analysis it appears to be have been developed using Electron. For anyone unaware Electron is a framework for creating applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that is powered by Chromium. Since it's powered by a browser it will have a footprint that is not too dissimilar to that of a normal browser with a single tab open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

Edit: And I just now happened to read the thread and noticed @Baste already pointed this out.

 

Yeah, I saw @Baste's mention of this as well. It's not just a web browser, I believe it also has a bunch of "server side" stuff built in to support running web applications locally. What I don't understand is why such an extensive system is required to show some menus.

(And to be honest, it's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in the thread that linked us here.)

 

Do you have a better suggestion which can run equally and looks the same on OSX, on Windows and Linux as well? Also can check internet connection, good enough to trust it with the license files (license management is built into the Hub), can manage multi-giga files (Unity installs), etc?

Yes, they could develop it in Unity, but then the unity (2D) engine would have been pulled in.
They could develop this app in native ways each platforms, but then the problem would be that why the hub is different on each platform? And I'm not sure it would be smaller in size, BTW.

But I'm really curious, what would you use for this multi-platform purpose? I may look into it to try to develop launcher for a game project.

 

I wouldn't recommend using a game engine to develop a launcher. The designs aren't really a fit for one another, and it's going to bring along a bunch of stuff that isn't necessary.

Personally, I'd start by looking at cross-platform GUI or multimedia frameworks. There are a few around - Qt, wxWidgets, maybe SDL, and indeed Electron. You could be right, maybe these days nothing else would end up being any smaller anyway. Thanks to Unity I haven't used one in quite a while. If that's just the state of things these days... well, you can probably guess how I feel about that.

You're also right that there's stuff other than the GUI part to be concerned with. It's an assumption on my behalf that this is where the memory usage is coming from (based on the fact that it uses Electron, which has a whole web renderer among other things). It could indeed be the libraries for some of the other functionality, or their dependencies. It could just be that the dependency chains end up bringing the kitchen sink along with them.

Taking a look at Blizzard's and Epic's launchers I'm also seeing 200+mb of memory usage. That said, those are both doing/displaying quite a bit, where for me the Unity one is literally just a tabbed menu with some thumbnail images. I can't tell what Adobe stuff is the launcher because they have a whole bunch of processes.