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

Post by bandushrew » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #353

mcguire wrote: post #103

" Conventional wisdom holds that you should never rewrite your code from scratch, and that’s good advice. " Speaking as someone who has done a fair number of rewrites as well as watching rewrites fail, conventional wisdom is somewhat wrong. 1. Do a rewrite. Don't try to add features, just replace the existing functionality. Avoid a moving target. 2. Rewrite the same project. Don't redesign the database schema at the…

The reason to avoid rewrites is because they generally get cancelled, or they build the wrong thing. In the first case, you have a system that mostly does what you want, but it has architectural issues that make it hard to change. You plan a rewrite. You get buy in from management. But the problem is that the business still needs those changes. If your rewrite takes more than a few months, then you're still going to…

Post by redwall_hp » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:47 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #349

gilgoomesh wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're proud that they can operate in just 500MB of RAM for an app that shows scrolling lists of text. The economics of RAM has changed somewhat but 1990s me is still appalled .

It isn't scrolling lists of text, though. It's user profiles, rich text, colored code snippets, images, uploaders for both, reactions, contextual menus, channel lists... I'm not saying they can't do better, but the app does do quite a lot.

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:06 AM UTC

somethingnot wrote: post #101

throwaway66666 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has the resources for that. Some companies make OSes, and some companies send rockets to space. Those feats are also powered by thin wrappers over electron. /s People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform. And there are projects far bigger than slack, like ffmpeg and OpenCV that have existed for decades, always had very fast development cycles, with only a subset of the funding and money that Sl…

> People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform OpenGL is dying. It's already deprecated on MacOS. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/opengl-opencl-dep...

Post by cs02rm0 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #345

xedrac wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that takes 10 years to rewrite (even gradually) has no business being written in Python. Yikes!

What would you write it in? At the time the re-write started, Django hadn't yet seen a public release, Rails barely existed (and had zero traction, and Ruby-the-runtime was horrible), dotnet was barely a thing, Clojure and Go didn't exist yet, dotnet barely existed. 2005 was a weird time. Realistically the only options at the time were Python, PHP (4, not 5), or Perl. I didn't come in until much later, but I don't re…

Post by me551ah » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

anchpop wrote: post #114

me551ah wrote: post #20

For me the gold standard of Chat applications is always going to be mIRC. It supports a ton of plugins, consumes 10-50mb of memory and little to no CPU. You could be connected to multiple servers and channels with DCC scripts running and you still wouldn't notice that it's even running. Even though Slack is using react now, they are still using electron under the hood. Which means it can never match the snappiness of…

I don't really understand the hacker love for IRC. It's always been hard to figure out what level of encryption you can expect, what plugins are supported on what clients, using it from multiple devices was never a good experience, you miss any messages sent while your pc was off, very poor support for searching server history for messages with certain text, sending files can be confusing, etc. Having a snappy client…