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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

#231

Post by BiteCode_dev »

IceSentry wrote: post #229
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

It's probably a generational thing.

The 20 last years, the web, the animations and the badly coded apps lead people to be used to slow software.

However, when you have used software for decades on much less powerful hardware, the sluggishness of all of it is kinda jarring.

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

#232

Post by crubier »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #222
crubier wrote: post #214

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…

> Have you _never_ looked at any UI toolkit in existence, ever ?

Funny that you say that, I actually did my PhD on this topic! You can find a state of the art of UI toolkits, from page 28 to page 96 of my PhD manuscript. https://hal.science/tel-01455466 I wrote it in 2015, so it's dated for sure. But short answer is: Yes I have been looking at A LOT of UI Toolkits, and one thing I am sure of is that you clearly are blissfully unaware of the socio-technical aspects of Toolkit adoption.

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

#233

Post by crubier »

jabradoodle wrote: post #223
ohgodplsno wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Even if Flutter existed, it would absolutely not have been an obviously smart move by Slack to DOUBLE their engineering workload by picking it instead of Electron while still having to develop a web based version. For what result? The app would most likely not be noticeably faster, if anything, just because the engineering effort that went into optimizing Slack performance would have been dilapidated in re-implementing and maintaining Slack in another toolkit.

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

#234

Post by WorldMaker »

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…

> Tauri wants to be less bloated, and therefore removes Chromium. Which makes it... not so cross-platform, apparently.

It's certainly cross-platform. Name a current OS that doesn't have one WebKit-forked webview or another available at all times. If you don't like Apple's insistence on only baseline WebKit out of the box, there's Microsoft's WebView2 which ships a known Chromium to every major desktop OS.

But really, if you are a web developer complaining about the differences between WebKit and Chromium, you may be spoiled. If you are a web developer complaining that you can't package a specific Chromium version (which is the real Electron benefit, not just that it packages its own Chromium but that every Electron app can pick and choose down to the exact Chromium version they want to ship), you've gone beyond spoiled to basically distrusting how the web platform is supposed to work.

(That's before you get to the other monoculture assumptions that no modern OS is instead shipping something like Firefox as the system default webview in 2023. It's all one tiny family tree with WebKit as the trunk.)

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

#235

Post by Minor49er »

e12e wrote: post #198
Minor49er wrote: post #111

Good. I've been looking for a Slack alternative Slack's app broke the basic functionality of the main input box where the home and end keys jump to the start and end of the entire input rather than the current line. This turns simple text edits into a chore. I pointed this out to their support staff who responded that the issue wasn't important enough for them to fix. Very disappointing

Fwiw, last time I looked, wee-slack was a decent improvement for slack text chat. These days maybe a matrix bridge? https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

This looks great. I will check this out. Thank you!

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

#236

Post by WorldMaker »

meling wrote: post #122

Unrelated question. Anyone know if it would be difficult to write a SwiftUI “compiler” to non-Mac architectures, including wasm? (I’m not a ui developer). I mean, I realize it is probably non-trivial, like most cross-platform ui, but I have been imagining that Apple would do this since they released it, so that their webapps could be written in SwiftUI instead of whatever they are doing now…

One of the rumors for Apple's increased visible attempts to, among other things, rewrite Foundation libraries themselves in Swift is to better unify their own internal cross-platform efforts (because they get to maintain Apple TV and Music apps on nearly every platform, if no other reason).

I don't know how much Apple is incentivized to make any steps they take towards SwiftUI cross-platform support available to third party developers, but it is an interesting rumor to watch.

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

#237

Post by ezst »

aidenn0 wrote: post #227
Zash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it makes sense to expect XMPP to "make an impact" ever, if by that you mean "to spontaneously become the next dominant network" (or it already is, under the guise of WhatsApp, bar the federated aspect). The forces in presence are too uneven and the modern internet is too consolidated to permit that to happen (even google cannot dislodge WhatsApp/Messenger).

IMO, what does matter for XMPP's future is that it remains appealing to a growing niche of users who want to be in control, for whom self/local-hosting is important (XMPP excels at that), who care about privacy (OMEMO is state of the art, and XMPP offers gentler alternatives where PFS isn't desired), and who understand the benefits of federation for resilience. This niche will grow naturally as more and more people get deceived by every monopolistic network being doomed to grow beyond a threshold of sustainability and implode as a result. By that time, it only matters that there are enough sufficiently well maintained and user-friendly clients on all platforms for those "super-users" to embark their peers (which is currently largely the case).

This is how I ended-up here, in fact. I refused to join WhatsApp because I was tired of previous forced migrations from protocols I thought were "too big to fail" (MSN, Skype, …), WhatsApp was already banned in some of the countries I was travelling to for work, and I so, after a failed errand with Matrix, I rediscovered XMPP 10 years after I had my first account on it. Today I have about a hundred contacts there, and the less tech-literate of my peers notice no practical difference in usability or features compared to something like WhatsApp: it just works.

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

#238

Post by aidenn0 »

ezst wrote: post #237
aidenn0 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it makes sense to expect XMPP to "make an impact" ever, if by that you mean "to spontaneously become the next dominant network" (or it already is, under the guise of WhatsApp, bar the federated aspect). The forces in presence are too uneven and the modern internet is too consolidated to permit that to happen (even google cannot dislodge WhatsApp/Messenger). IMO, what does matter for XMPP's future is tha…

By "make an impact" I was thinking maybe being more popular than either Matrix or IRC (both of which I use regularly, and both of which I would prefer XMPP to) not "spontaneously become the next dominant network"

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

#239

Post by remram »

theappsecguy wrote: post #220
nine_k wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth us that once you have shipped Electron, there's no way back, the cost of switching is too high. This is not specific to Electron, it's a similar effect with every core technology, all the way to COBOL.

This right here. Something monumental would have to happen for senior leadership to green light a rewrite, because that’s a massive project that will bring in no additional revenue.

That they are content with mediocrity, I have observed, but they deserve to be called mediocre. "It's Electron" is not an excuse.

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

#240

Post by palata »

OJFord wrote: post #85
palata wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent said "meant for communities" and not "used for communities". The biggest difference I see is that Discord is "free" for communities, or at least the model is different: an individual user can apparently pay to contribute to the server and "unlock" features. Also I think Discord just comes with history for free, which is a killer feature in many communities. Slack is more "meant for companies" in the sense…

But that's like saying 'Discord isn't meant for communities, it's meant for gaming communities'. They both caught on beyond their original market. (And funnily enough, aren't they both pivots out of a company doing something else? Discord a game and Slack some other start-up?)

I don't think it's the same. Maybe "is meant for" is not the right wording, but the point is really that the model of Discord just works better for communities, because the server admin does not have to pay for the users (rather the users can contribute to the server).
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