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Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

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

#181

Post by cinntaile »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #180
crubier wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a living proof that software companies do not give a single shit about their users and just want to push more crap, for cheaper, all the time. Exact opposite, to me Electron is the living proof that software companies correctly care a lot about building a product people want, and correctly realize that the large majority of people correctly do not care that one of their top productivity app uses $1 worth of RAM, bu…

Overprivileged HN-commenter believes that upgrading RAM is something that every user can afford, wants to afford (oh, I'm sorry, let me blow 50 bucks for your pretty eyes because you couldn't be arsed to not blast a whole javascript runtime on your app that you're forcing me to use to upgrade my drivers or launch a game), ignores physical limitations (unupgradable laptops, already maxed out configs from back in the d…

He's right though, most people really don't care about 600 MB of RAM or whatever.

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

#182

Post by jraph »

nottorp wrote: post #174
ohgodplsno wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is currently eating 600MB of my RAM, for something I check maybe once an hour. You know what I'd like to use my RAM for instead ? Gradle. kotlinc. intellij. Things that I actually use to do my work, and not a bad IRC that wants to make me pay for the privilege of seeing old messages. Electron is a demonstration of laziness and a living proof that software companies do not give a single shit about their users an…

> Slack is currently eating 600MB of my RAM, for something I check maybe once an hour. You forgot about the times when two or more of the electron applications you run because you have no other option decide to take 20% CPU each or more. Even if you make it a point of pride to run a computer that eats power measurable in kilowatts per hour, that's bad when on battery at least. And from the article: > One of the main…

> What's the difference?

The code of the web engine can be shared among several apps, instead of each of them having its own copy in RAM, making it less of an issue when having several of them.

If each of them don't abuse RAM usage of course.

Which is a big if of course.

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

#183

Post by creshal »

max_streese wrote: post #159

Is it just me or do others find the Electron bashing a little over the top as well? I mean VS Code, Discord, Slack and Obsidian are all in very widespread use and work perfectly fine for me. Are there alternatives to Electron that require less resources? Tauri seems to be proof that there are. But I think there is real value in large communities and backing. Electron seems to work perfectly fine to me for everyday us…

Discord is not working "perfectly fine" on desktop for many people. Usually, the browser version is faster, needs less resources, has fewer platform integration problems (mic/camera access etc.), and crashes less often. And has less critical security vulnerabilities, as a browser gets patched much faster than Electron in general, and Discord in particular (who tend to be on an older branch, due to some native C++ libraries, that as far as I can tell have no user-visible impact).

And VSCode has to be contrasted with Atom, which is the same but in so much worse: It takes a lot of effort to make Electron work well.

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

#184

Post by creshal »

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?

WebKit is five loosely related browser engines in a trench coat. A lot of the code is "platform" specific, and most of the optimization happens in that layer. Apple's Cocoa webkit is a lot more polished than WebkitGTK could ever hope to be with its meagre dev resources.

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

#185

Post by ohgodplsno »

cinntaile wrote: post #181
ohgodplsno wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overprivileged HN-commenter believes that upgrading RAM is something that every user can afford, wants to afford (oh, I'm sorry, let me blow 50 bucks for your pretty eyes because you couldn't be arsed to not blast a whole javascript runtime on your app that you're forcing me to use to upgrade my drivers or launch a game), ignores physical limitations (unupgradable laptops, already maxed out configs from back in the d…

He's right though, most people really don't care about 600 MB of RAM or whatever.

Go ask your parents if they're not pissed off that the laptop they bought for cheap is now struggling to run Peggle Deluxe and they don't understand why, while there's 7 Electron apps running in the background eating all that memory.

People don't care about 600MB. They care about how using their PC feels, and Electron is a massive contributor to it feeling like shit.

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

#186

Post by nottorp »

jraph wrote: post #182
nottorp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack is currently eating 600MB of my RAM, for something I check maybe once an hour. You forgot about the times when two or more of the electron applications you run because you have no other option decide to take 20% CPU each or more. Even if you make it a point of pride to run a computer that eats power measurable in kilowatts per hour, that's bad when on battery at least. And from the article: > One of the main…

> What's the difference? The code of the web engine can be shared among several apps, instead of each of them having its own copy in RAM, making it less of an issue when having several of them. If each of them don't abuse RAM usage of course. Which is a big if of course.

The .so is shared. All those uncompressed cat gifs, no.

I'm not familiar with internal browser architecture, but do they make at least a token effort to not render/run attached javascript for elements that are not currently in view?

I haven't measured, but my gut feeling is Electron apps go extremely crappy when you have like 30 memes in a row in a chat channel and make the mistake of switching to it.

Edit: hey, what happens when you open a 500 M log file in vscode?

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

#187

Post by creshal »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27
palata wrote: post #20

> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…

> why not going for a JVM-based technology? Not to pick on the JVM, but does anyone actually build new desktop software for the JVM that's meant to be downloaded and installed by mainstream consumers? Qt and other frameworks work pretty well (with their own flaws) but I'd simply never even consider the JVM as a viable option for desktop software. The last JVM app I installed was probably Minecraft in 2012.

JavaFX/OpenFX is surprisingly decent these days, but it got suckerpunched by Oracle licensing for a long time and had a bunch of compatibility issues between releases that made upgrading painful.

I probably would consider it now for a new project, but not 5-10 years ago, when dev cycles for now-popular apps would've started realistically.

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

#188

Post by dathinab »

prmoustache wrote: post #151
x0x0 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like to be explained why MS teams electron app is so different to the web version then.

I would like to know it, too.

MS seems to be using electron in the worst possible way.

I mean it's basically running an outdated version of the web version bundled into a even more absurdly outdated version of electron.

Given how bad the decision is it really looks like it's just for ticking of some checkbox and avoiding claims that MS is intentionally hurting other desktop system... but honestly the way they did it makes it look even more like that.

Through there are technical reasons AFIK:

- it seems to be that they have some custom native "call/video/screen-capture" code, which doesn't seem to provide any sustainable benefits but is less reliable in my experience.

- (speculative) for some time in the not that distant past (Chrome <v110) on Wayland desktops for screen sharing Chrome did only support an older experimental version of the protocol, locked behind an experimental flag. Through most distros set up pipewire in a way where the old protocol was still supported (on the fly converted) and even through the chrome flag was experimental it did work very reliable. So re-implementing pipewire support by hand would have been quite of an bad decision I hope Teams didn't do.

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

#189

Post by 255kb »

max_streese wrote: post #159

Is it just me or do others find the Electron bashing a little over the top as well? I mean VS Code, Discord, Slack and Obsidian are all in very widespread use and work perfectly fine for me. Are there alternatives to Electron that require less resources? Tauri seems to be proof that there are. But I think there is real value in large communities and backing. Electron seems to work perfectly fine to me for everyday us…

I maintain an open-source app built with Electron. It serves tens of thousands of users every months and nobody complained in 5 years that it is being built with Electron. Not saying that Electron is perfect, and that it couldn't be a bit more performant, but as a solo maintainer (and entrepreneur) it helps me ship something that save people time. The burden of maintaining an application is already huge. Having to juggle with multiple environments would be a hassle and I definitely wouldn't do it.

That being said, if a "drop-in" alternative would be available I would probably try to switch at one point. But the alternative would have to be on par with the ecosystem (including packaging, binaries signing, etc.), the community, the ease of use... I don't think there is such a thing yet.

The app, if you are interested: https://mockoon.com

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

#190

Post by razemio »

max_streese wrote: post #159

Is it just me or do others find the Electron bashing a little over the top as well? I mean VS Code, Discord, Slack and Obsidian are all in very widespread use and work perfectly fine for me. Are there alternatives to Electron that require less resources? Tauri seems to be proof that there are. But I think there is real value in large communities and backing. Electron seems to work perfectly fine to me for everyday us…

I feel so too. There are currently no valid alternatives I know to electron. It is sad, but this is the current state of UI frameworks, if you are targeting cross-platform with identical look and feel.

Also electron comes with its own advantages which many on HN seem to forget.

code-server for instance was very easy todo, because vscode was build using electron. It runs virtually anywhere. Uses fewer resources then most WMs on a headless device if you need a full blown IDE.

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