Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM

" (And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone.) "

The one major concern I have with this framework, and with rust UI frameworks in general, is accessibility. That's something you get for free or nearly-free in other ecosystems but seems to require a fair bit of elbow grease here.

Still, I would wholeheartedly recommend Iced, with the one caveat that it hasn't yet hit 1.0 and version upgrades could be a little painful, and might bring big changes.

[0] https://thinktotem.com

Why do people not use adblockers even this late since their introduction?

Your example would look like this:

    export component Hello inherits Rectangle {
        in property <string> text: "World";
        width: 500px; height: 500px;
        background: #505050;
        border-width: 1px; border-color: blue;
        drop-shadow-blur: 15px; drop-shadow-color: #0008;
        VerticalLayout {
            alignment: center; spacing: 12px;
            Text { text: "Hello, \{root.text}!"; font-size: 20px; color: white; horizontal-alignment: center; }
            HorizontalLayout {
                alignment: center; spacing: 8px;
                for c in [#f00, #0f0, #00f, #ff0, #000, #fff]: Rectangle { width: 32px; height: 32px; background: c; }
            }
        }
    }
    

I'd like to know it. I don't think that it can be substantially better. You have to compromise between the amount of customization you are allowed to do and the amount of options you have to pick values for.

I can't vouch for GPUI, I don't know how good its compromise is, but it bears enough similarities to other modern UI-toolkits. I don't think there is a better way, but if you know one, I'd like to know about it.

And, well, don't forget, it is a front-page example, that is not necessarily an example how one should compose their code, it demonstrates what you can do with GPUI. In real life code you'd probably move those children's construction into separate named functions, maybe you'd use some predefined styles to apply to individual elements, instead of picking fg/bg/text-colors, maybe sizes and some other attributes for each one explicitly, and maybe some other tricks.

Also, this is basically what Tailwind code looks like.

On a more serious note I feel like it's not bad but could be improved if they managed to break it down by styling domain (sort of like SwiftUI).

Something along the lines of .flex(gap: 2).text(size: "xl", color: ...)

the native app wins every single time. Give me native or give me death!

If a model can tell you anything you’d hope to have a human tell you, what’s the difference? It’s a different point of failure— models can go offline, but employees can also quit anytime too.

For reference, my src-tauri/target/ folder is 8.3gb.

It's either you peg a CPU while simply scrolling, or your GPU does a small amount of power efficient, buttery smooth, work.

https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.discordapp.Discord

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

who downloads this? there's a website available

But the kicker is, if everyone buys faster computers, the developers will correspondingly stuff more "features" in there to make it slower so the same number of people are still screwed. This is the recorded history of software engineering.

Hot take: We should be able to comfortably run generic office desktops today with 4GB ram. We don't because too many people think "Who cares?"

Amen. I hate Discord, and I loathe that I have to use it just because "gamers" use it and it became the default for video game communities.

Windows doesnt leave you a lot of change from 8GB these days.

I used to have issues as Firefox would open a tab, cap out my available memory and 3cx would start stuttering causing voice issues.

The solution was to move to a carbon with 32GB RAM, but like, I should probably expect more out of Windows/Slack/3CX/Firefox in the first place. Feeding the beast more RAM is no longer a financially viable alternative for a lot of people.

With a native app, which I still welcome for perf/mem reasons, I'll have to configure opensnitch (or smth of the sort) to take care of the outgoing telemetry calls... A system-wide uBO would be a nice to have!

Going by me and my friends, no.

> striking the best balance between resource footprint

If this is the best balance possible, then that balance is horrible. Having to pull along a whole browser is a massive ball and chain on any program that I wish I could cut off anywhere I see it.

> no additional local apps on their device

This isn't an advantage for my use cases, nor any of my friends apparently.

> still preserving their native UI

As in preserving Discord's or your OS's UI?

I don't care about the former. I'd use DiscordMessenger[1] if it was mostly feature complete and Discord didn't ban third-party clients.

The latter isn't really preserved in any meaningful opinion by shoving it into a browser. The difference in UX post-install between a PWA and a seperate browser window (or a seperate app) is zero to me. It's still not native.

[1] https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm

Also naming your company "__slop" is a bold move!

I think what we're seeing here - and likely to continue to see - is new versions of web UI that eschew a lot of the historical baggage given they don't need to support older websites. And possibly something more powerful. So I guess re-writes or partial ports that take only the parts we need. Presumably a bunch of people will try and hopefully, a few succeed.

While you _should_ put some effort into tuning and fixing these things for your specific project, you will "mostly" get things like cross-platform support for all major desktop operating systems, some support for accessibility-tools like screen readers and voice over, devtools and debuggers, application installers, (push) notifications, caching, some aspects of security and cryptography, log handling, and file handling for free, or at least get a reasonable push in the right direction, with Electron.

The alternative is either getting each of these things from a different third party source, or making them all in-house. With a popular abstraction layer like Electron + a web stack, you will to some extent encounter the same problems, mysterious log messages, design considerations and other issues as everyone else. This means that you can find documentation, stack overflow questions, new hires, consultants, blogs, LLMs, etc. that have the skills and knowledge you need, instead of researching and solving everything in-house.

Of course, being the Teams org they'd likely still find a way to end up with a bloated mess even after a Rust rewrite.

On the netbook, well.. CWM, UXterm, Dillo, CLI/TUI mail, usenet, IRC and so on clients, groff, nsxiv, mpv, MuPDF... it runs snappier than the NUC for what it does. Programming? Golang for networking stuff -security, not like Rust, but far better than C-, simple C99 for small software, or S9/JimTCL. Otter Browser for emergencies (JS pages from public institutions/govts in my country).

But.. maybe, maybe this is the opposite of google translate in the 00's - maybe, if you keep porting back and forth, you will eventually arrive at perfection :P

> It’s not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”

soon™

And yeah, The Verge was one of my favorite resources earlier too but I've stopped visiting it due to subscription requirement on most articles.

There is absolutely no reason for Discord—a chat application—to run everything a browser does. Why do I need to play videos in the chat application? Why do individual avatars and even tags have to run custom shaders? It's called scope creep.

> a11y, IME, RTL

All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago. Comes with entire language packs.

> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript

See above: scope creep; features for features' sake.

Maybe not anymore. I don't work on any Chrome-sized Rust codebases so I don't know, but iterating on anything is so much faster that it might work out fine.

What top-level engineering experience led you to believe the magic of multiple decades guaranteeing improvements?

Artcraft it's doing that in every software application;

> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?

Every Arftcraft software can be command line driven and it's still fast and small compared to your bloated crap.