When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

Good news for the Slack team, as this means they'll no longer be the poster child for "look how bloated Electron apps are! Slack takes up x gigabytes of RAM!" Great work, Slack team.

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#5

Post by steeve » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

I was so happy they had finally gone native.

The disappointment is strong.

On a side note, SBlack, a lightweight slack client is very impressive on memory usage [1].

1. https://www.sblack.online/

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#6

Post by pwinnski » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

"We acknowledge that nobody should ever rewrite from scratch... but after five years we're rewriting from scratch because we know better."

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#7

Post by btmiller » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

steeve wrote: post #5

I was so happy they had finally gone native. The disappointment is strong. On a side note, SBlack, a lightweight slack client is very impressive on memory usage [1]. 1. https://www.sblack.online/

How does this work? I thought Slack deprecated their IRC gateway; is this all API-based then?

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#8

Post by zeusly » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

I wonder if they increased their efforts after seeing VS Code (also a complex Electron app) run fast and memory-efficient.

Before VS Code everyone just accepted Electron's memory bloat, maybe slack even had plans to go fully native b/c no one thought it could be done properly.

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#9

Post by mtarnovan » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

How about a native client? I think it's safe to assume that Slack has the resources for this.

Re: When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

#10

Post by nottorp » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

They say React. How is this a desktop app? It's still in a browser.