Top
Best
New

Posted by thunderbong 11 hours ago

Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why(www.windowslatest.com)
159 points | 170 commentspage 4
zerr 2 hours ago|
So, it has always been a skill issue.
revolvingthrow 2 hours ago||
Hot take, but: love electron. Write once, runs anywhere. The majority of bugs aren't platform specific. Easy to get nice visuals that stay consistent across different OS. Yes, it's not native. I don't care. It's not a painting to be admired. The focus on looks and visuals versus usability and ux is a plague.

Yeah, it takes some extra ram. Fork my stuff and rewrite it in rust if you care. I don't. The few hot spots can be fixed by using a lower level language. Is vs code not zippy enough? I certainly haven't noticed the slowness. People keep complaining about unnecessary load as if hardware hasn't progressed since 2004. It's hugely important for things like your OS. A few apps you run twice a month? Who cares.

But what about software used by billions, asks a person angry about my electron project used by thousands? How many ages were taken up by the five second startup time when you multiply that by however many users (all this time would be spent curing cancer of course)? Sure, improve performance when needed. For the vast majority of projects it's not needed. The average computer isn't pi zero.

bigstrat2003 2 hours ago|
> Yeah, it takes some extra ram. Fork my stuff and rewrite it in rust if you care. I don't.

And that, right there, is why people hate apps which use Electron. You are spending my system resources so that you can be lazy and not have to program as much. That's not really acceptable development practice.

CamperBob2 15 minutes ago||
If it's FOSS, what's your beef? You want a native version, point a clanker at the repo and tell it to party on.
cykros 8 hours ago||
I literally just run another browser Window with discord on the web rather than the native app.

Discord is probably my least favorite thing to happen to chatting online, but for some reason it's what everyone wants to fucking use.

Aozora7 8 hours ago||
Discord is my favorite thing to happen to chatting online. It combined everything useful from IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, in one application and with modern UI, and things we now take for granted like attachments and link embeds. And even 10 years later, there are still no alternatives that aren't just discord but worse.
abhinavk 8 hours ago||
Discord tab also uses 500-600MB of RAM. This is private resident bytes of the tab excluding browser and its helper processes.
mpalmer 7 hours ago||

    Discord’s new Rust client had its friends list loaded before the current Electron app could get past its loading screen, in a 15-second clip that we found on the X account of Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. The video had 2.3 million views at the time of writing, and Discord employees have confirmed that both apps were launched from a cold start.
Crazy what passes for journalism these days.
itopaloglu83 9 hours ago||
On another note, Microsoft Teams and new Outlook use very little amount of memory on paper, because their main windows show up under the Edge name. It’s a Microsoft way of solving the high ram usage problem.
goda90 9 hours ago||
WebView2. Other applications can also use it but it seems like there's less out-of-the-box functionality than Electron
senorrib 9 hours ago|||
That’s also how Tauri claims to use so little ram.
jasonvorhe 9 hours ago||
By being dishonest and misleading?
Scharkenberg 10 minutes ago|||
What an insane take. Also, the parent comment is incorrect, because the WebView2 memory is clearly attributed for both Teams and new Outlook in Task Manager.
snarfy 8 hours ago||||
When they can all share the same Electron implementation instead of individual copies it reduces memory quite a bit. I'm not trying to defend Electron way of development but I can see why they pushed WebView2.
lunar_rover 8 hours ago||||
By reusing the system webview? It's what web frameworks should've done.
pwg 9 hours ago|||
When has Microsoft not been dishonest and misleading? Being dishonest and misleading has been Microsoft's entire game plan since all the way back into the Bill Gates era.
Surac 8 hours ago||
Rust to death i told them
cedws 2 hours ago||
I’m disappointed to see the continued proliferation of JavaScript and TypeScript. I cannot fathom why people are using these garbage languages still when we have so much better options and code is essentially free now.
hyperhello 2 hours ago|
These languages were developed for hypertext. Discord is hypertext. The question is why Rust or C++ or anything would be so suitable for developing chat rooms; it’s not even clear why JavaScript would necessarily be slower after being statically compiled.
tapper 8 hours ago||
Could they of used servo?
tapper 8 hours ago||
I hope they can do some work on a11y because it's bed. Not as bad as it was but still slow and clunky to use with a screen reader.
cpursley 9 hours ago|
Great option for this that lets you use Rust along with real native UI for cross platform: https://github.com/redbadger/crux
bscphil 8 hours ago|
"cross platform" I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what it uses for native on Linux, and whether it supports both Qt and GTK. Turns out the docs don't even mention Windows? "Cross platform" is now just MacOS + iOS + Android + Web? I guess the thought is supposed to be that crux helps you port your app to Windows if you want to... but even the example applications only run on those four platforms.
More comments...