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Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#43

Post by api »

framel wrote: post #40
api wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron. Qt? No mobile, slower development. Java? No mobile, deployment nightmare, Oracle cooties, and often just as heavy as Electron. Native UI? Out of the question. We don't have anywhere near the resources to develop our app four to five times, implement every new feature four to f…

https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/

That's QML, which isn't that different from a browser rendering engine. I'm talking about an actual native UI implemented in native code, not a weird quasi-browser. Of course Qt itself also has quasi-browser features like its style sheet widget styling stuff. If we're going there, why not just use HTML5/JS which has a million billion times more support?

Also C++ is not really the best option. I code systems software in C++ but for UI dev it's not quite productive enough. I've worked with large Qt code bases before and no thanks. I suppose if they've modernized it and incorporated C++11 features it might be more bearable, but in the past it was a pretty awful mess of raw pointers and ownership semantics bugs and very very long compile times.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#45

Post by Piskvorrr »

d3ckard wrote: post #4

104 MB at the moment. For me at least, Slack really got their shit together sometime last year and improved the issue significantly. I still remember having to restart Slack twice a day, but it ain't issue anymore.

Over a gigabyte - never used more than a single organization. Gave up, the in-browser version has all the features the webkit-wrapper version has and is tamed well by the browser itself.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#47

Post by natecavanaugh »

makkesk8 wrote: post #29

to be fair, this is not an electron issue as vscode runs fine on all platforms. I don't really want to bash the devs but... Maybe they should take a look at it.

VS Code is by far the best optimized Electron app I've seen, but with a total of 5 files open, it will still turn my laptop into a pizza oven on my lap.

It, and every JS/Desktop hybrid has so much promise, but my Lord, as a proficient JavaScript junkie that has a deep abiding love for the language, it's not performant.

I just can't use either Atom or VS Code for day to day work.

PS, Sublime, please support some form of JS plugins, even if that means limiting the API for JS plugins.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#48

Post by auscompgeek »

taneq wrote: post #34
e12e wrote: post #31

I quickly abandoned the slack "App", but even dedicating a chromium tab to Slack ended up being absurdly heavy. So I've finally migrated to weechat+weechat slack plugin. For a moment I thought I was too late, as slack is killing the xmpp and irc bridges - but the dedicated slack plugin for weechat uses the slack api. As an added bonus, there are no more animated emojis in my peripheral vision that can be mistaken for…

I don't have a horse in the slack/xmpp race (although I do hope open standards win out) but if they have a public API which lets you do all that, would it be easy enough to build an XMPP gateway?

IRCCloud have actually written a IRCv3 gateway for Slack (although it's not open... yet): https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#49

Post by jrs95 »

api wrote: post #37
framel wrote: post #26

Electron is cancer

We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron. Qt? No mobile, slower development. Java? No mobile, deployment nightmare, Oracle cooties, and often just as heavy as Electron. Native UI? Out of the question. We don't have anywhere near the resources to develop our app four to five times, implement every new feature four to f…

Perhaps a “low memory mode” or something like that could fix this? If I had to guess, I would think a lot of nice UX features could be disabled and that might reduce memory usage dramatically. Only load recent messages in the currently selected channel, don’t display anything but text, etc. I doubt this would really reduce usage of features a lot overall, and few people would ever turn this on, but it might get the power users to stop complaining about performance.
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