51–60 of 214 posts
Christ, so many buzzwords and frameworks and rewrites but all users ask for is a damn chat application with few tabs. Either I'm getting old and grumpy, or it used to be possible in the year 2000 without your computer fans taking off and 1gb of ram.
Christ, so many buzzwords and frameworks and rewrites but all users ask for is a damn chat application with few tabs. Either I'm getting old and grumpy, or it used to be possible in the year 2000 without your computer fans taking off and 1gb of ram.
In year 2000 you might only have to care about Win98. And that’s it. In 2017 there’s no tech stack that lets you write consistent UIs across multiple platforms. Except, unsurprisingly, Electron
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When these kinds of things come up there's often complaint that desktop apps running in the browser are inefficient. As it happens, I agree. An old favourite of mine, Adium, probably never used 600 MB because I'm pretty sure my PowerBook G4 had less RAM than that. But I think it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that these apps should be written in a native framework rather than a web view. Slack is doing much mo…
That's why I'm developing eul, a lightweight native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Facebook etc: https://eul.im It's only 4 MB and handles tens of thousands of Slack messages in one chat without lag. 1.0 release is going to be out in early November.
On a related note, for an app I have open all day long but interact with on an event-driven basis - Slack's UI is just too darn big. I miss the days when the only chat UI was a small column (eg. ICQ).
What the hell is taking up all that RAM? Slack is using over 800MB of RAM on my computer right now, and it's completely idle. I've got a C# process on my computer right now handling thousands of messages per second and consuming 1/20th the RAM. If you rebuild Slack in Xamarin you'd probably drop your RAM consumption to under 50MB, just a guess. JS fiends are gonna tell me C# ain't JS, and I agree. TypeScript ain't JS…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is what the native macOS Messages.app does as well. On my Mac, with relatively heavy usage, I'm at around 100 MB of RAM.
Wow, that's crazy. The iOS Messages app is native. I'm only familiar with iOS development... is AppKit that bad?
The screenshot shown in the article shows Slack using well over 600 MB of RAM. I'm not sure I find this acceptable for a chat app with four "tabs" open.
When these kinds of things come up there's often complaint that desktop apps running in the browser are inefficient. As it happens, I agree. An old favourite of mine, Adium, probably never used 600 MB because I'm pretty sure my PowerBook G4 had less RAM than that. But I think it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that these apps should be written in a native framework rather than a web view. Slack is doing much mo…
I would. Unfortunately with these browser-based app solutions, rarely are features and resource usage proportional. Therefore, runtime configuration doesn't help that much.
I personally would like to see Chromium take a more staunch approach at memory reduction.
Sorry.
The idea for discussions on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, then don't comment until you do.
This isn't only about being nice, it's about preventing HN from becoming boring. Flamewars destroy forums. It wouldn't take many users posting like you did here for this site to quickly die. We all need to help to prevent that.
That would be awesome post if it was made as an experiment, to test the limits of Electron, to learn and let others learn, to just play with BrowserView. But seeing this as a technical write-up about one of the very popular chat apps used out there, it's just sad and wasteful.
Christ, so many buzzwords and frameworks and rewrites but all users ask for is a damn chat application with few tabs. Either I'm getting old and grumpy, or it used to be possible in the year 2000 without your computer fans taking off and 1gb of ram.
All I can say is that Slack is one of those few apps that are deceptively simple and work on virtually all kinds of devices.