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Slack is a massive company with a singular product. Can they really not afford to write their product natively? Their backend should be reusable, and they could

Slack is a massive company with a singular product. Can they really not afford to write their product natively? Their backend should be reusable, and they could write a core of the application in C++ that should give them a core functionality in all operating systems. Then have a native team take over for iOS, mac android, and windows, Linux. There are cross platform libraries that gets you a ui pretty far, or they could use pure graphics library and roll their own. A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion.

danShumway 8y ago
I feel like I might be falling into some kind of fallacy, but it seems at first glance like your argument supports GP's. If Electron is such a horrible platform that you literally can't write performant software with it, and Slack's performance problems are really a huge problem for regular users, and yet as a massive company with a singular product they still rely on it, then I would guess at least one of two things should be true: A) Native app development is actually way more horrible than most people say, and Electron's experience is so much better that even a company as big as Slack finds it preferable to building a dedicated Mac team. OR, B) Slack's dev team just may not actually care all that much about performance in the first place, and they might just be writing a poorly optimized app on top of a poorly optimized platform which exasperates all of its problems. Or, maybe a combination of the two. I dunno. Anecdotally using Slack within a web browser (which should get rid of some of Electron's downsides since it's no longer a separate browser instance) I still occasionally see slowdown and issues with the App. Not nearly as bad as, say, Twitter, but not great. Certainly not as performant as I would expect an interface this simple to be. So while it's silly to claim that Electron doesn't have an impact on performance, I suspect that even if the Slack team was writing native apps, they still might end up with a piece of software that has problems. Maybe fewer of them, or maybe even more, since you can get away with a lot of bad architecture in a C++ program before you hit the same bottlenecks like loading time or typing lag. Are we sure that the Slack team wouldn't just view a native codebase as license to cut even more corners with performance?
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lucideer 8y ago
> A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion. There are plenty of wealthy companies with huge resources that make bad software. The size of your developer pool is not the sole key to quality.

danShumway 8y ago

I feel like I might be falling into some kind of fallacy, but it seems at first glance like your argument supports GP's. If Electron is such a horrible platform that you literally can't write performant software with it, and Slack's performance problems are really a huge problem for regular users, and yet as a massive company with a singular product they still rely on it, then I would guess at least one of two things should be true: A) Native app development is actually way more horrible than most people say, and Electron's experience is so much better that even a company as big as Slack finds it preferable to building a dedicated Mac team. OR, B) Slack's dev team just may not actually care all that much about performance in the first place, and they might just be writing a poorly optimized app on top of a poorly optimized platform which exasperates all of its problems. Or, maybe a combination of the two. I dunno. Anecdotally using Slack within a web browser (which should get rid of some of Electron's downsides since it's no longer a separate browser instance) I still occasionally see slowdown and issues with the App. Not nearly as bad as, say, Twitter, but not great. Certainly not as performant as I would expect an interface this simple to be. So while it's silly to claim that Electron doesn't have an impact on performance, I suspect that even if the Slack team was writing native apps, they still might end up with a piece of software that has problems. Maybe fewer of them, or maybe even more, since you can get away with a lot of bad architecture in a C++ program before you hit the same bottlenecks like loading time or typing lag. Are we sure that the Slack team wouldn't just view a native codebase as license to cut even more corners with performance?

deleted 8y ago
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lucideer 8y ago

> A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion. There are plenty of wealthy companies with huge resources that make bad software. The size of your developer pool is not the sole key to quality.