7 ms·

Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mI

Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources.

bandrami 7y ago
> as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago When Atlassian finally pulled Hipchat last year I was tasked with finding the replacement. Turns out the one that met everybody's needs best was a local IRCd and whatever desktop client for it people liked. Some problems have been solved correctly for a while; chat is one of them.
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  I'm actually in the process of doing this right now. (Looking for a Slack replacement.) Which specific daemon did you settle on?
  - syockit 7y ago
    I was about to ask the same. One of the things I badly needed was persistent logs. I googled around and found https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc which lists bouncers that serves the purpose. Not really looking for replacement though (team is currently on Mattermost)
  - bandrami 7y ago
    inspircd with a cron job to mail the logs daily to a pastebin for people who wanted to reference them later.
- phicoh 7y ago
  I'm curious, how does IRC handle history and multi-device sync? How does IRC handle end-to-end encryption in groups? How does IRC handle editing messages?
  - bandrami 7y ago
    I asked users for a desired feature list, and none of those were mentioned.
    - jacobsenscott 7y ago
      That's kind of like saying nobody mentioned they wanted wheels for their car, so you got them cars without wheels. What's the problem?
  - progval 7y ago
    > I'm curious, how does IRC handle history Servers can re-send history when a client join. At least InspIRCd supports this (though it's not enabled by default.)
  - mavhc 7y ago
    Quassel. Blowfish normally. Press up arrow, retype message, or type *correction.
  - rb808 7y ago
    Personally I dont need that stuff. Encryption maybe, but if we can run inside our VPN we should be good.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  I am an old-time IRC user, but IRC is missing tons of features I use literally every single day in Slack. It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers. It does not keep history of discussions. It does not have media embedding. It is very far from a solution in 2019.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    If you have control of the entire IRC stack (the daemon, the bouncers, etc) you can work around a lot of those issues.. though at that rate, it's probably a lot less work to just host something like Riot..
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      How do you work around the lack of a kept history?
      - bandrami 7y ago
        In our case, we didn't. Kept history wasn't a feature people used or wanted. Stuff you were going to refer back to later was for email.
        DagAgren 7y ago
        As I said, I use this every single day of the week. Not having it means it is not even close to a solution.
      - t34543 7y ago
        Lack of history is a feature, not a bug. If you want persistent storage of decisions/etc there are better options out there.
        DagAgren 7y ago
        Yes, like Slack.
userbinator 7y ago
I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. Several things I can think of: "quantity is not quality"; JS developers far outnumber everyone; making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy, and they are not interested in platform-native functionality, preferring a "consistent" UI across platforms instead; "premature optimisation" dogma that means no one cares about efficiency anymore. Microsoft Teams and (later versions of --- they actually moved away from perfectly decent native Win32) Skype also use Electron, and that's Microsoft. That says the size of the company and its resources matters little in things like this.
- shaan7 7y ago
  > making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy Its easy peasy with Qt as well. I am the only dev for https://www.sostronk.com/app https://www.sostronk.com/app and it looks (and behaves) _exactly_ as our designer wants it to. (Oh, and this is when I'm also spending time working on backend stories). > no one cares about efficiency anymore. That is not true. Discord and friends spend a lot of time for efficiency because they're using Electron. It is not impossible to have a (relatively) efficient application with Electron (VSCode for example), it just takes more effort. Compare that with Qt where performance is free of cost - in the last 5 years at SoStronk, I've hardly ever needed to spend dedicated effort for improving performance. Another example, and I wasn't aware of this till very recently, is the Telegram Desktop app which is Qt as well. But yeah, I do agree with your first point, the only reason Electron is in use is because JS developers are a plenty. At the end, cost is the #1 thing when businesses make decisions.
  - wtetzner 7y ago
    But it's not clear that JS developers being plentiful actually reduces cost in the long (or even medium) term.
- nolok 7y ago
  Ehhh for Skype it's mostly a Skype thing. Pretty much every decision made about Skype be it platform, features, ... Is wrong. I'm convinced Skype within Microsoft is now some middle step they put their product managers through for a year or two without paying much attention to them, and each tries to implement his "own mark" on it as some sort of achievement. The alternatives to that theory are too scary.
joepie91_ 7y ago
Keep in mind that Ripcord only needs to implement support for whatever Slack has already decided to implement. They don't need to do the whole "iterative design" process (which Slack is doing for them), which is precisely the part where C++/Qt things tend to fare poorly.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That doesn't explain why Slack seemingly can't do it. They could literally hire the Ripcord author and pay him to continue development, and sell Ripcord as Slack Lite. It would be peanuts for them, and it would vastly improve their product offering.
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    But then it wouldn't be theirs, and that's clearly more important than success now.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Slack should stop iterating as each time they do it the product gets worse. They're not good at this.
peterwwillis 7y ago
> I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. A lot of reasons... a solution 1) grows to match the size of its budget constraints 2) becomes more complicated the more people with long titles have a say in it 3) becomes more difficult to implement the more people that are working on it 4) becomes less useful the more people there are that can dictate what it does and how 5) fulfills more of the letter than the spirit of its requirements as more hierarchies of people manage it 6) becomes less user friendly as fewer typical users are involved with its development Though the actual answer is "somebody with power just wanted electron for personal reasons and nobody had the power to turn the ship once it started on its course"

bandrami 7y ago

> as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago When Atlassian finally pulled Hipchat last year I was tasked with finding the replacement. Turns out the one that met everybody's needs best was a local IRCd and whatever desktop client for it people liked. Some problems have been solved correctly for a while; chat is one of them.

UI_at_80x24 7y ago
I'm actually in the process of doing this right now. (Looking for a Slack replacement.) Which specific daemon did you settle on?
- syockit 7y ago
  I was about to ask the same. One of the things I badly needed was persistent logs. I googled around and found https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc which lists bouncers that serves the purpose. Not really looking for replacement though (team is currently on Mattermost)
- bandrami 7y ago
  inspircd with a cron job to mail the logs daily to a pastebin for people who wanted to reference them later.
phicoh 7y ago
I'm curious, how does IRC handle history and multi-device sync? How does IRC handle end-to-end encryption in groups? How does IRC handle editing messages?
- bandrami 7y ago
  I asked users for a desired feature list, and none of those were mentioned.
  - jacobsenscott 7y ago
    That's kind of like saying nobody mentioned they wanted wheels for their car, so you got them cars without wheels. What's the problem?
- progval 7y ago
  > I'm curious, how does IRC handle history Servers can re-send history when a client join. At least InspIRCd supports this (though it's not enabled by default.)
- mavhc 7y ago
  Quassel. Blowfish normally. Press up arrow, retype message, or type *correction.
- rb808 7y ago
  Personally I dont need that stuff. Encryption maybe, but if we can run inside our VPN we should be good.
DagAgren 7y ago
I am an old-time IRC user, but IRC is missing tons of features I use literally every single day in Slack. It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers. It does not keep history of discussions. It does not have media embedding. It is very far from a solution in 2019.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  If you have control of the entire IRC stack (the daemon, the bouncers, etc) you can work around a lot of those issues.. though at that rate, it's probably a lot less work to just host something like Riot..
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    How do you work around the lack of a kept history?
    - bandrami 7y ago
      In our case, we didn't. Kept history wasn't a feature people used or wanted. Stuff you were going to refer back to later was for email.
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        As I said, I use this every single day of the week. Not having it means it is not even close to a solution.
    - t34543 7y ago
      Lack of history is a feature, not a bug. If you want persistent storage of decisions/etc there are better options out there.
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        Yes, like Slack.

userbinator 7y ago

I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. Several things I can think of: "quantity is not quality"; JS developers far outnumber everyone; making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy, and they are not interested in platform-native functionality, preferring a "consistent" UI across platforms instead; "premature optimisation" dogma that means no one cares about efficiency anymore. Microsoft Teams and (later versions of --- they actually moved away from perfectly decent native Win32) Skype also use Electron, and that's Microsoft. That says the size of the company and its resources matters little in things like this.

shaan7 7y ago
> making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy Its easy peasy with Qt as well. I am the only dev for https://www.sostronk.com/app https://www.sostronk.com/app and it looks (and behaves) _exactly_ as our designer wants it to. (Oh, and this is when I'm also spending time working on backend stories). > no one cares about efficiency anymore. That is not true. Discord and friends spend a lot of time for efficiency because they're using Electron. It is not impossible to have a (relatively) efficient application with Electron (VSCode for example), it just takes more effort. Compare that with Qt where performance is free of cost - in the last 5 years at SoStronk, I've hardly ever needed to spend dedicated effort for improving performance. Another example, and I wasn't aware of this till very recently, is the Telegram Desktop app which is Qt as well. But yeah, I do agree with your first point, the only reason Electron is in use is because JS developers are a plenty. At the end, cost is the #1 thing when businesses make decisions.
- wtetzner 7y ago
  But it's not clear that JS developers being plentiful actually reduces cost in the long (or even medium) term.
nolok 7y ago
Ehhh for Skype it's mostly a Skype thing. Pretty much every decision made about Skype be it platform, features, ... Is wrong. I'm convinced Skype within Microsoft is now some middle step they put their product managers through for a year or two without paying much attention to them, and each tries to implement his "own mark" on it as some sort of achievement. The alternatives to that theory are too scary.

joepie91_ 7y ago

Keep in mind that Ripcord only needs to implement support for whatever Slack has already decided to implement. They don't need to do the whole "iterative design" process (which Slack is doing for them), which is precisely the part where C++/Qt things tend to fare poorly.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
That doesn't explain why Slack seemingly can't do it. They could literally hire the Ripcord author and pay him to continue development, and sell Ripcord as Slack Lite. It would be peanuts for them, and it would vastly improve their product offering.
- zentiggr 7y ago
  But then it wouldn't be theirs, and that's clearly more important than success now.
malvosenior 7y ago
Slack should stop iterating as each time they do it the product gets worse. They're not good at this.

peterwwillis 7y ago

> I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. A lot of reasons... a solution 1) grows to match the size of its budget constraints 2) becomes more complicated the more people with long titles have a say in it 3) becomes more difficult to implement the more people that are working on it 4) becomes less useful the more people there are that can dictate what it does and how 5) fulfills more of the letter than the spirit of its requirements as more hierarchies of people manage it 6) becomes less user friendly as fewer typical users are involved with its development Though the actual answer is "somebody with power just wanted electron for personal reasons and nobody had the power to turn the ship once it started on its course"