Reflecting on Meteor

19 Oct 2017

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Meteor is a very powerful framework with a few innovative and great ideas behind it. However, for all that it enables me to do, it still makes me miserable on a regular basis. Meteor is simply too resource intensive and too time consuming to run on my current laptop for me to enjoy the expierence that Meteor and MongoDB allow for.

When I first used Meteor, I was wary given the stories I had heard from numerous classmates. There were cases of people simply having Meteor run so slowly they found it practically unusable, and other who simply could not get Meteor to work at all no matter the time afforded to it. The only semi-reliable solution I had heard of was to install a version of Linux as its lightweight nature allows for Meteor to run extremely quickly - seconds instead of minutes for build operations.

I have run into much the same issues that I have heard of. While my Meteor does work without issue, it is very slow and very demanding on my system - it slows down all other operations on my computer such as browsers or IDEs. I have managed to avoid dual-booting a Linux operating system as my Meteor isn’t terrible - about ten minutes to build (or rebuild) my apps. While this is tedious as I have to sit and wait before being able to view any changes to my apps, it isn’t so terrible that I feel I cannot deal with it.

Meteor makes me sad. But I still appreciate its functionality and I know that there aren’t too many alternatives out there and none of them are without drawbacks in some form or another. I still enjoy Meteor for its end results, even if the process is like being hit on the head with “a small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth’s atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light”.