Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

linen.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 253 posts

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#131

Post by nioj »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #67
glowingly wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's probably Ghidra or Jetbrains IDEA in 2023. Both are desktop, thought I could see the debate on whether or not developers are considered mainstream consumers. I use them on Linux and Windows, so I definitely get value out of their cross platform capabilities. I use Eclipse-based tools at work (again, I can see the debate). It seems like Samsung's Smarthings (IoT platform) used to use Groovy, but has recent…

Its never fun finding the correct java version to get ghidra going on a new machine. I don't use java often enough to remember versioning differences between the official and openjdk. I never install the right one on the first try, always requires a trip to the ghidra docs. I must have gone through this 7 or 8 times in the last 5 years. Its also really rare for a desktop app written in java to look good. I'm sure its…

They have recently introduced support for UI theming in version 10.3 released last month.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#132

Post by tylercrompton »

remram wrote: post #115
Sytten wrote: post #86

I build and ship a production application using tauri and linux support is the most painful experience I had in a long time. They use WebKit GTK which is really not a good fondation IMO, its hard to test for all versions, its much slower than other browser, it has weird bugs. In general the idea of not shipping a browser bundle is nice, in practice it doesn't really work for a startup. It's just too much unrelated te…

I think using Electron is excusable if you are a startup, like you said your time is limited. It's much less acceptable if you are Slack and still ship a slow bloated Electron app 10 years in.

What exactly makes Electron better for speed than say popular cross-platform GUI library X?

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#133

Post by friendzis »

tylercrompton wrote: post #132
remram wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think using Electron is excusable if you are a startup, like you said your time is limited. It's much less acceptable if you are Slack and still ship a slow bloated Electron app 10 years in.

What exactly makes Electron better for speed than say popular cross-platform GUI library X?

Webviews are built on weakly, dynamically typed languages, which naturally have development speed advantage over statically typed languages in the happy path. On top of that you have multitude of frameworks even more optimized for the happy path. It is much faster to create an MVP of a GUI with web technologies.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#134

Post by tomkarho »

friendzis wrote: post #133
tylercrompton wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly makes Electron better for speed than say popular cross-platform GUI library X?

Webviews are built on weakly, dynamically typed languages, which naturally have development speed advantage over statically typed languages in the happy path. On top of that you have multitude of frameworks even more optimized for the happy path. It is much faster to create an MVP of a GUI with web technologies.

Also the same GUI code translates (kind of) to more platforms easier than writing it all from scratch. Web, desktop, mobile. Almost one codebase can be used for all three.

Could you do the same with say, Java (and maybe soon with .NET)? Maybe. But web has a lower barrier for entry and faster speed of development cycle. Not to mention larger pool of developers available.

All of this translates to two pretty much essential features for any startup: speedy entry to market (MVP) and low cost. And once you get going, it is really hard to pivot your technology stack to something else.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#135

Post by x0x0 »

tylercrompton wrote: post #132
remram wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think using Electron is excusable if you are a startup, like you said your time is limited. It's much less acceptable if you are Slack and still ship a slow bloated Electron app 10 years in.

What exactly makes Electron better for speed than say popular cross-platform GUI library X?

The massive advantage of Electron is write once -- with some extra overhead, perhaps 40% effort -- and you can ship the same app to web, mac, windows, ios, android, and linux.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#136

Post by friendzis »

tomkarho wrote: post #134
friendzis wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webviews are built on weakly, dynamically typed languages, which naturally have development speed advantage over statically typed languages in the happy path. On top of that you have multitude of frameworks even more optimized for the happy path. It is much faster to create an MVP of a GUI with web technologies.

Also the same GUI code translates (kind of) to more platforms easier than writing it all from scratch. Web, desktop, mobile. Almost one codebase can be used for all three. Could you do the same with say, Java (and maybe soon with .NET)? Maybe. But web has a lower barrier for entry and faster speed of development cycle. Not to mention larger pool of developers available. All of this translates to two pretty much essen…

> Also the same GUI code translates (kind of) to more platforms easier than writing it all from scratch.

With an exception of web there are very solid GUI cross-platform (linux, windows, mac) frameworks out there. Qt is even pretty good at targeting native look.

> All of this translates to two pretty much essential features for any startup: speedy entry to market (MVP) and low cost.

Yes, web technologies let you build MVPs faster, that's literally in my original comment. However, in order to provide quick MVPs these technologies inherently sacrifice long term maintainability.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#137

Post by friendzis »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #67
glowingly wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's probably Ghidra or Jetbrains IDEA in 2023. Both are desktop, thought I could see the debate on whether or not developers are considered mainstream consumers. I use them on Linux and Windows, so I definitely get value out of their cross platform capabilities. I use Eclipse-based tools at work (again, I can see the debate). It seems like Samsung's Smarthings (IoT platform) used to use Groovy, but has recent…

Its never fun finding the correct java version to get ghidra going on a new machine. I don't use java often enough to remember versioning differences between the official and openjdk. I never install the right one on the first try, always requires a trip to the ghidra docs. I must have gone through this 7 or 8 times in the last 5 years. Its also really rare for a desktop app written in java to look good. I'm sure its…

> Its also really rare for a desktop app written in java to look good.

Java/JVM as platform suffers from trying to be all encompassing "second OS". Want to do time, fonts, cacerts? JVM does its own thing. Want to do UIs? Hey, there are widgets from 90s, should be good.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#138

Post by lelanthran »

I see all these "Alternative to $FOO" type projects that differ in the implementation but not in the result; IOW to the end-user the product looks and behaves practically the same as $FOO.

I understand wanting to produce an alternative, but I can't help but wonder why not produce an alternative that is substantially different?[1]

From the screenshots Linen is almost a clone of Slack, with (I think) the biggest difference being "google-indexable". There's literally, on the landing page, no compelling reason for using this product over Slack.

Looking at the landing page for Linen[2], I don't see anything about why one would choose Linen over Slack other than "google-indexable" and "advanced thread management"[3].

I think the biggest differentiator is pricing, but that is not an issue for companies using Slack, and unprofitable targeting anyone who finds Slack too expensive.

[1] The easy "substantially different" thing to do would be to rearrange the layout. The hard "substantially different" thing to do would be to actually have a performant chat program that starts in [2] https://www.linen.dev/

[3] Managing conversation threads in IM is not a problem I've heard anyone complain about, TBH.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#139

Post by PaulRobinson »

txdv wrote: post #129
Sytten wrote: post #86

I build and ship a production application using tauri and linux support is the most painful experience I had in a long time. They use WebKit GTK which is really not a good fondation IMO, its hard to test for all versions, its much slower than other browser, it has weird bugs. In general the idea of not shipping a browser bundle is nice, in practice it doesn't really work for a startup. It's just too much unrelated te…

I wanted to have apple notes on linux, so I used tauri and just redirected to the apple notes web app. I could really feel the lag and the lack of snappiness when interacting with that UI. Its webkit, safari also uses webkit? Why is it so slow?

I think you might be confusing an OS web view - which is what Tauri uses - with WebKit, which is the web view on Apple operating systems. It’s the way to get Safari inside your app if you are on an Apple device. On Linux, there is no WebKit, the web view will be your system browser. That might not be very fast.

Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

#140

Post by saagarjha »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #139
txdv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to have apple notes on linux, so I used tauri and just redirected to the apple notes web app. I could really feel the lag and the lack of snappiness when interacting with that UI. Its webkit, safari also uses webkit? Why is it so slow?

I think you might be confusing an OS web view - which is what Tauri uses - with WebKit, which is the web view on Apple operating systems. It’s the way to get Safari inside your app if you are on an Apple device. On Linux, there is no WebKit, the web view will be your system browser. That might not be very fast.

WebKit definitely compiles for Linux. You can try it in GNOME Web.
Post reply on HN