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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of Apple users here and I'm pretty sure that Apple charge $200 for that $1 worth of RAM ;-)

Apple charges $200 for 8GB additional RAM. So the cost of 600MB of Apple RAM in $15. That's the cost of 1 month of a subscription to Slack. You're likely to use your laptop for ~4years = 50months, so the RAM cost of Slack is around 2% of overall Slack cost, even on Apple hardware. Users pay 2% more to get more RAM, Slack developers have 200% productivity thanks to not having to deal with low-level optimization crap,…

I was making a joke :-)

As an industry we trade runtime efficiency for lowering the bar on developers; we've been doing that for 40 years now. The industry has been growing so hard that that is a unavoidable and at a macro level probably a net positive.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the cost of 600MB of RAM is $200. You just end up having bonus to waste on more electron apps. This whole "this is how the world works" bullshit is post-hoc rationalisation done by wealthy idiots trying to justify their purchase by saying "it's just 5 cents a day if you consider it'll last ten years". This is bullshit and only applies if the purchase you're making is insignificant to you. So, congrats, $200 is in…

Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts. Clearly, companies and developers are behaving in a way you don't like. You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots. I'm explaining to you the correct way to explain this behavior, an explanation that does not assume that a majority of successful companies and people are stupid, but that instead r…

>Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts.

No, you're stating an opinion and trying to pass it off as facts.

>You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots.

If you work with developers, you know we're all idiots at heart. And lol absolutely yes billion dollar companies are stupid. You think that scale prevents stupidity ? No, if anything it scales it up even harder. A company that was doing stupid things as a self funded startup with 5k in the bank and a multinational megacorporation with 50 billion in the bank both have equal opportunities to be stupid. The billion dollar corporation even gets to use it's sheer scale to walk over their stupidity and not die from it.

> stop raging,

The day I'll stop complaining will be a miserable one. Stopping the rage is what lead to absolutely dreadful state of software development today.

>an explanation that does not assume that a majority of successful companies and people are stupid, but that instead relies on rational arguments.

One does not preclude the other, the rational argument is still a moronic one.

>Of course I'd love it if there was a perfect way to develop software once without micromanaging memory, run it on web, desktop, mobile and have it be super performant at the same time.

Have you _never_ looked at any UI toolkit in existence, ever ? Even Flutter is a better option than Electron if all you want is a multiplatform app, and this is coming from someone not necessarily holding Flutter in his heart. The bare minimum to do if you're going to make your life easier is to not pick the absolute worst option that is Electron. There's a scale to multiplatform toolkits, and Electron is at the bottom end of this, being neither a good technical choice, a good product choice, a good choice for your users. Electron benefits a single group: developers, but mostly company management, happy to crap out software.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts. Clearly, companies and developers are behaving in a way you don't like. You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots. I'm explaining to you the correct way to explain this behavior, an explanation that does not assume that a majority of successful companies and people are stupid, but that instead r…

>Look, I'm not even stating an opinion here, I'm just stating facts. No, you're stating an opinion and trying to pass it off as facts. >You seem to believe that billion dollar companies are just stupid, that all developers are idiots. If you work with developers, you know we're all idiots at heart. And lol absolutely yes billion dollar companies are stupid. You think that scale prevents stupidity ? No, if anything it…

Flutter isn't a great example, slack predates it by years.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looks like crap, but everywhere!

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

#225

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…

While I appreciate VSCode, I think Discord, Slack and Obsidian are not selling the platform at all. They feel sluggish and have poor ergonomics. Now the second one may or may not be attributed to Electron depending of if you buy the cultural thinggy, but the first one clearly is. Mumble is super reactive in comparison to them, and most note softwares dance around Obsidian. Having a latency on local clicks and transit…

I can't imagine anyone calling Obsidian sluggish. Do you perhaps have a lot of plugins?

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

QT is just gonna be untenable for most people. Learning C++ is hard enough, but learning QT is basically a different dialect of C++, and I can't even say it's worth the investment.

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

#227
post #80
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp succeeded with XMPP because they defined a superset and their only client implements 100% of it. This isn't applicable to XMPP at large at all. I tried getting E2EE working. There are 3 standards. Some clients implement one or two of them. Some clients none. It's a nightmare to get them to talk together. Then you have all the other 400 XEPs that may or may not be implemented by clients. Things like file tran…

Such a subset exists already: https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/

That's great. Probably too late to make an impact (And I say this as someone who uses XMPP regularly), but I would have killed for something like that 10 years ago. Weeding through clients was such a pain. 90% of the clients were either half-baked or well-baked, but super out-of-date, and without having certain XEP numbers memorized, finding the remaining 10% was super frustrating.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tauri uses WebkitGTK, which has pretty bad performance compared to other browsers on the same hardware.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/890#issuecomment-14...

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

#229

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…

While I appreciate VSCode, I think Discord, Slack and Obsidian are not selling the platform at all. They feel sluggish and have poor ergonomics. Now the second one may or may not be attributed to Electron depending of if you buy the cultural thinggy, but the first one clearly is. Mumble is super reactive in comparison to them, and most note softwares dance around Obsidian. Having a latency on local clicks and transit…

These things are all very subjective. Not everyone is affected the same way by latency. I hear people complaining about it all the time on thw internet, but in practice I never notice it and I don't know anyone that does either. Ergonomics is the same, I think discord is really nice to use and all the alternatives I've used have been worse.

To be clear, your opinion is absolutely valid I just don't think they apply equally to everyone.

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