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Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

slack.engineering

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Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#161

Post by tedmiston »

fragmede wrote: post #99
lwansbrough wrote: post #45

What the hell is taking up all that RAM? Slack is using over 800MB of RAM on my computer right now, and it's completely idle. I've got a C# process on my computer right now handling thousands of messages per second and consuming 1/20th the RAM. If you rebuild Slack in Xamarin you'd probably drop your RAM consumption to under 50MB, just a guess. JS fiends are gonna tell me C# ain't JS, and I agree. TypeScript ain't JS…

It doesn't help that the Slack app is running in dev and not production mode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899482

Slack's response in the tweets indicates that they are not using the dev build but that the info is being reported incorrectly in the browser.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#162

Post by dijit »

outworlder wrote: post #158
brightball wrote: post #36

As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise. Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.

Indeed. Some posters seem to think that, because you CAN build a chat app consuming a few megabytes of RAM, it means you should and it's practical. It's like pointing to 64KB demoscene games and saying "see, you can write a game in 64KB, why does this one take multiple gigabytes". Well, by all means, create a Slack competitor in hand-optimized assembly if you wish. Or whatever else you prefer (Rust?). If it's a bette…

Why is it one extreme or the other?

I defend decisions made by IDE developers because those are niche markets, but slack is not a niche market. They're "IRC for normies" (yes, yes, they fix a lot of cruft too but, it's effectively the same system).

We're not talking about hand optimised assembly, but maybe assuming that I'm going to throw 1/8th-1/3rd of my system resources into your IRC clone is not healthy.

the highest tier macbook pro can only handle 16G of memory. I had to get a special laptop (precision 5520) in order to get 32G of ram, which I feel is the only option that is future-proof for the next 3 years, and if everyone follows the slack model then it will be the minimum in less than that.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#163

Post by codereflection »

iamatworknow wrote: post #116
codereflection wrote: post #112

I am wishing that the devs on the HipChat desktop apps are paying close attention to this. The Slack desktop app has been a resource hog, but nothing compared to the HipChat desktop app. (All anecdotal evidence)

HipChat's being deprecated in the not to distant future in favor of Atlassian's Slack clone called "Stride".

Not according the the Atlassian folks. HipChat will live on, Stride is just replacing HipChat as their SaaS offering.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#164

Post by seba_dos1 »

djhworld wrote: post #113

Is anyone else getting chat service fatigue? Looking at my dock I have Discord, Slack, Textual (IRC), WhatsApp Web open. I wish there was a service that just amalgamated all these together into one thing, with a rough set of common features (e.g. ability to post images/gifs/videos, text etc)

I somewhat miss XMPP.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#165

Post by wink »

krisdol wrote: post #101
wink wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But all the fancy stuff still doesn't work, it's mostly just fluff. (NB: I don't use VS Code or Atom and the Slack App on Linux has literally zero upsides for me vs a pinned desktop chrome bookmark or using nativefier, screenhero still misses features.)

Spotify, Slack, and Atom work fine for me, though slack is probably the most annoying one on all platforms. Atom is far from fluff in terms of functionality, but it's fine if you don't use it.

the fluff was obviously directed at slack and other "apps that are just bundled websites" - I see that an editor is something different (and I do use VS Code on Windows at times, but not very often)

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#166

Post by CharlieHess »

outworlder wrote: post #158
brightball wrote: post #36

As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise. Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.

Indeed. Some posters seem to think that, because you CAN build a chat app consuming a few megabytes of RAM, it means you should and it's practical. It's like pointing to 64KB demoscene games and saying "see, you can write a game in 64KB, why does this one take multiple gigabytes". Well, by all means, create a Slack competitor in hand-optimized assembly if you wish. Or whatever else you prefer (Rust?). If it's a bette…

this comment is a breath of fresh air in a sea of armchair-architecting

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#167

Post by kentt »

brightball wrote: post #36

As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise. Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.

I'd be okay with Slack being sufficient but taking a gig of RAM. Instead it's really shitty and buggy and also take a gig of RAM. Any one of their problems doesn't make it a horrible product, that just the one most often pointed to as indicative of how horrible their engineering is.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#169

Post by CharlieHess »

iagooar wrote: post #120

How about improving boot time? Nobody talks about it, but since Slack uses so much RAM, I like to close it from time to time and open it when I feel like getting distracted. But then, it takes 30 seconds (!) from opening the application to being able to type the first message. There is no other app on my MBP that needs so long, and we're talking pretty new hardware with SSD and an i7. Sorry, but I don't care about yo…

This is one of the highest priority items for the next quarter or two.
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