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I don't really understand the hacker love for IRC. It's always been hard to figure out what level of encryption you can expect, what plugins are supported on wh

I don't really understand the hacker love for IRC. It's always been hard to figure out what level of encryption you can expect, what plugins are supported on what clients, using it from multiple devices was never a good experience, you miss any messages sent while your pc was off, very poor support for searching server history for messages with certain text, sending files can be confusing, etc. Having a snappy client is cool but it'd be cooler if it supported half the modern features people enjoy when using chat.

driverdan 7y ago
Their comment had nothing to do with IRC. It was comparing two chat clients and how Slack's Electron version is much worse than a native version.
- anchpop 7y ago
  The native client they were referring to was mIRC, which does much less than Slack does. A better comparison might be Discord, which performs much better than Slack and is also written in Electron. VSCode, written in Electron, performs much better for me than Visual Studio (a native app), but I wouldn't use that as proof that Electron is faster than native apps because Visual Studio does so much more
  - driverdan 7y ago
    The major differences I can think of off the top of my head are threading, reactions, voice chat, and history. Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC.
    - entropicdrifter 7y ago
      Don't forget screen-share and video chat
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      > Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC. And you, without knowing all the product requirements and technical constraints, know this exactly how?
me551ah 7y ago
I'm not really comparing the slack of today with mIRC which was first released in 1995. In early 2000s back when IRC was still very popular, mIRC was a breeze to use on computers which existed. It hasn't seen much development over the past decade and it shows, but it's commendable that lightness was a priority for developers who built it.

driverdan 7y ago

Their comment had nothing to do with IRC. It was comparing two chat clients and how Slack's Electron version is much worse than a native version.

anchpop 7y ago
The native client they were referring to was mIRC, which does much less than Slack does. A better comparison might be Discord, which performs much better than Slack and is also written in Electron. VSCode, written in Electron, performs much better for me than Visual Studio (a native app), but I wouldn't use that as proof that Electron is faster than native apps because Visual Studio does so much more
- driverdan 7y ago
  The major differences I can think of off the top of my head are threading, reactions, voice chat, and history. Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC.
  - entropicdrifter 7y ago
    Don't forget screen-share and video chat
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    > Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC. And you, without knowing all the product requirements and technical constraints, know this exactly how?

me551ah 7y ago

I'm not really comparing the slack of today with mIRC which was first released in 1995. In early 2000s back when IRC was still very popular, mIRC was a breeze to use on computers which existed. It hasn't seen much development over the past decade and it shows, but it's commendable that lightness was a priority for developers who built it.