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.
Interactive embeds, notifications, inline messages, voice and video calling, an extensive app API...
If this was the case we wouldn't see so many Electron apps. You just don't perceive enough of the upsides to see why the decisions are being made.
What I've noticed is that much of the distaste with Electron apps has more to do with the idea of waste than with the actual practical implications. Programmers like things to be efficient and optimized. Electron sacrifices those traits in a couple of ways, in favor of actual productivity. So "the downsides of Electron outweigh the downsides of native apps" when you're someone who patrols the task manager looking for…
But that is just one one electron app. Imagine that every desktop app you use is written in electron. I am pretty sure that even 32GB workstation would be stretched to the limits.
At the time there was a strong internal directive that it not only not be Java, but not anything that even looked a bit like Java if you squinted at it (e.g. dotnet) - plus we've always been an "anything but Windows" shop anyway
Sounds like a decision born of vanity and pedantry. "These VMs are too good, and the type systems too useful, to hell with them!"
There's a lot of culture that comes with a language. 10 years ago, Java and C# were associated with enterprisey complexity and interchangeable programmers working under architecture astronauts, Python was used by the cool kids. Keeping to simplicity is hard when the available libraries and people you recruit were used to https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
As much as I'd love a native app, for a fast moving company with rolling releases it's probably very hard to keep three platforms at the same level especially if you want to do experiments too or roll out features to a small subset.
> for a fast moving company with rolling releases Name three major feature improvements to Slack in the last three years. I can think of one, threads, which are a fucking usability disaster and should have been killed immediately. I can't think of a single other major feature.
How about a native client? I think it's safe to assume that Slack has the resources for this.
No matter the available resources, maintaining three separate desktop apps as well as a web app would mean fewer features and more bugs across the board. And Linux would probably be left on Electron (with less support attention), if not abandoned altogether.
You 'd think that a software company that just went public for tens of billions would be able to produce 3 programs.
Yeah, as said the problem isn't just the ram price it's whatever else you might need to buy to get it. But 580 is also pretty darn depressing for 8GB. For reference I bought 64GB for my workstation for less than $400 a few years ago. And that's with 25% sales tax.
This isn’t a fair comparison. Desktop memory is cheaper, laptop manufacturers are rent seeking with upgrades normally, and with soldered memory they have free reign. It’s true that often the upgrades are bundled, ie; can’t get 16GiB without an i7. But I think that’s fairly rare at least. As for 16GiB, there’s a hard limit there for LPDDR3, and intel CPUs do not support LPDDR4 yet. Oh, and another thing regarding cost…
Wasn't meant to be an apple to apple comparison. Just a reference. But it does kind of illustrate just how bad of a fit electron apps are.
Well, the biggest point of soldered ram has always been to be able to recoup costs by denying people to buy ram from someone else.
Even in the old days it was much cheaper to buy 2 GB of ram and then upgrade to 4 GB than buying it with 4 GB in the first place.
Creating a web app with a multi-billion dollar valuation indicates it is their strength. Who cares about a little superfluous memory usage compared to that.
Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment? Can you see how maybe other people might have valid concerns about the effects of a product, and ask for more rigor in the company's processes?
>Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment?
That's perhaps the most tortured analogy I've ever heard. I can't even begin to fathom how you think that's comparable or relevant.
I've been using Slack on the desktop daily since the alpha version. I've never found it to have UI lag. I honestly think that most people us use phrases like "webtech junk" are offended on principle and not because of any measurable difference that matters to regular users.
Low-latency UIs that respect user input are amazing. They're just quite rare these days. I guarantee the difference is noticeable and makes a difference—look at how everyone liked (and still likes) the UI smoothness and low UI latency of iOS, for example, and iOS, though probably the current front runner on this front for popular operating systems, is just so-so at it. I guess if my principle is that I like my comput…
Another, maybe more appropriate, comparison for UI lag might be between VisualStudio Code and Sublime Text. VSCode is based on Electron and though it is well optimized and a fine editor, I can feel the lag when I use it to edit code. One the other hand, ST is native and editing any text is super smooth, even files that are much too large as to be reasonably edited.
Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment? Can you see how maybe other people might have valid concerns about the effects of a product, and ask for more rigor in the company's processes?
>Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment? That's perhaps the most tortured analogy I've ever heard. I can't even begin to fathom how you think that's comparable or relevant.
Ah, a popular strawman tactic these days: attack the analogy.
Sounds like it got my point across. You just don’t like the point.