3 ms·

I'm a proponent of Electron for startups just getting off the ground with cross-platform desktop apps. Slack has raised some serious capital, however. The desk

I'm a proponent of Electron for startups just getting off the ground with cross-platform desktop apps. Slack has raised some serious capital, however. The desktop app is the cornerstone of their product and performance is a known pain point (cpu/memory). Why haven't they left electron in the dust and taken performance seriously?

WorldMaker 9y ago
Slack can take performance seriously and stick with Electron. That's certainly what this very article is about: big steps towards better performance.
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes. Slack switching to something like Qt would (maybe) fix Slack, but then we would still have many slow Electron apps.
raverbashing 9y ago
I'd guess at this point, doing what Slack does would require a reimplementation of a web browser, with all the problems this would entail
sidlls 9y ago
Why should they "take performance seriously?" They probably have a bunch of front end devs who are cheaper to pay and clearly there is support sufficient for them to raise large amounts of capital. I won't use the desktop app because I have standards. But apparently we're too few in number to matter. And from a business perspective there's nothing wrong with that. Frequently what engineers want and what makes (good business) sense are different.
cakeface 9y ago
I think that it's a trade off between features and performance. Are they going to add more customers by making Slack smaller and faster or by adding threaded conversations and other user features? Certainly stability is a requirement, and I see that in the changes they are talking about here. They could allocate a ton of engineers to platform native Slack implementations that would be fast as hell. But would they be able to ship a new feature like threaded conversations to all platforms quickly? What would be the cost? How would that change their presence in the marketplace. Everything is a trade off.

WorldMaker 9y ago

Slack can take performance seriously and stick with Electron. That's certainly what this very article is about: big steps towards better performance.

k__ 9y ago
Yes. Slack switching to something like Qt would (maybe) fix Slack, but then we would still have many slow Electron apps.

raverbashing 9y ago

I'd guess at this point, doing what Slack does would require a reimplementation of a web browser, with all the problems this would entail

sidlls 9y ago

Why should they "take performance seriously?" They probably have a bunch of front end devs who are cheaper to pay and clearly there is support sufficient for them to raise large amounts of capital. I won't use the desktop app because I have standards. But apparently we're too few in number to matter. And from a business perspective there's nothing wrong with that. Frequently what engineers want and what makes (good business) sense are different.

cakeface 9y ago

I think that it's a trade off between features and performance. Are they going to add more customers by making Slack smaller and faster or by adding threaded conversations and other user features? Certainly stability is a requirement, and I see that in the changes they are talking about here. They could allocate a ton of engineers to platform native Slack implementations that would be fast as hell. But would they be able to ship a new feature like threaded conversations to all platforms quickly? What would be the cost? How would that change their presence in the marketplace. Everything is a trade off.