7 ms·

Also, only the backend is written in Rust. The desktop client is an Electron app: https://github.com/revoltchat/desktop https://github.com/revoltchat/desktop

jstx1 5y ago
Now I want to know if HN hates Electron more than it loves Rust. Or do they perfectly cancel out?
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  Electron is MAX_HATE, Rust is MAX_LOVE, but Discord is more Electron than it is anything. As in, I don't care if Rust runs on their servers if Electron runs on my desktop.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    Yeah, Electron feels more like a choice that matters.
- kingofclams 5y ago
  Personally I see “Written in rust” as more of a meme, often using buzzwords like “blazing fast” and “memory safe.” Electron is definitely worse than rust is good.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    > Blazing fast So have you measured it or do you just mean you haven't implemented as many features? -> Usually the latter.
    - stouset 5y ago
      Cynicism aside, from what I’ve seen it’s been the former. See regex and rg by burntsushi as an example.
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Don't get me wrong there's a lot of room for speed in programs we use regularly, but I make two observations: 1. Speed is usually found by by people have worked on existing tools in the space, and they don't often make that much of a song and dance about it beyond that theirs is faster. 2. Speed is found in the minds of people not in their tools. When you get past a certain amount of native- ness, you get optimizations by knowing more or having a brilliant insight into the problem rather than using a new meme-language. It might be necessary for certain types of programming but it's not sufficient. Basically I don't like weird meme based marketing of tech. I'm a grumpy old man already and I'm the ripe old age of 20
        stouset 5y ago
        You were the one that cynically asked if the advertised performance improvements were real or imaginary, not me. To your point, many of the improvements from Rust-based tools appears to come from the ability to express performant semantics safely and elegantly in the language. You could write an equivalent in C, but the Rust one comes naturally, can be expressed at a higher level with better abstractions, and often comes out with top-tier performance before even investing in microoptimizarions (as long as the Big-O performance is in check).
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Is Rust as blazing fast as Electron is slow?
    - grishka 5y ago
      But Rust runs on the server while Electron runs on the client. You can't compare them like that!
    - ginko 5y ago
      Rust is about as fast as C++, so I'd call that normal speed.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - pizza234 5y ago
      Electron is not necessarily slow - see Visual Studio Code; it's certainly not as reactive as Sublime Text, but it's fast/reactive enough.
      - Griffinsauce 5y ago
        I know, it was a (admittedly vague) joke. People rag on Electron with the same shallowness as they praise Rust. I bet you can make slow things in Rust. It's all a soup of trade-offs, resource management and hype.
  - curun1r 5y ago
    I’ve always seen “written in Rust” as relevant for a specific sort of software. Because CVEs are inevitable in C/C++ software and dealing with CVEs has become part of the user interface to that software. Knowing something is “written in Rust” means its attack surface is much smaller. Working in tech, the “drop everything and migrate to a version that isn’t vulnerable” instances are far too common and disruptive. But as soon as you get into consumer software with auto-update mechanisms and an expectation that end users won’t be computer professionals who know how to read a CVE and evaluate its urgency, the “written in Rust” distinction becomes a mostly irrelevant implementation detail. Or, worse, it’s an indication that the GUI will feel wrong in some way because the Rust community seems averse to writing GUIs with GTK, UI Kit and whatever the hell Microsoft recommends using for Windows these days.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Electron is definitely worse than rust is good." I would say, it depends very much on the developer. There are probably only a handful of people, who can write a fast GUI in C/++ that is also safe, plattform independent - and a joy to use. (I am definitely not among them) But there are a ton of devs, knowing how to accomplish it - with the webtoolkit. In other words, I indeed would prefer a electron app, over some hacked together GUI in a "performant" language. Security, performance - and UX wise.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Thankfully there is no C++ on Electron.
  - jasonhansel 5y ago
    The issue is that the alternatives to Electron--GUI frameworks that use native controls--are so hard to use and inconsistent that Electron seems good by comparison.
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  Discord is not bad for me wrt resource usage, but it wasn't always good and it had problems. I've been impressed by their development. The Revolt.chat SPA looks decent, if featureless, and will probably be fine as the project progresses. This has just launched its beta, after all.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Ah, the monolithic HN myth again. That's right, let's just ignore that this place has thousands of readers, thousands of commenters, and that there's no thing called "HN" to talk about as it if had intentionality and/or opinion.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    There definitely are trends on HN and while they don't fit a 100% of the population, they drive a lot of the opinions and discourse.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Sometimes folks probably feel HN has three people: the person, the people that agree with the person, the people that disagree with the person. Four, if you count moderaters (who I imagine are cooler than Robocop). Okay, enough navel gazing for me!
  - rectang 5y ago
    While the readership may be large and diverse, there is nevertheless a Hacker News zeitgeist, especially due to the way downvoting causes comments to be greyed out. The acceptable range of discourse does not extend to anything non-flaggable, and comments do not stand or fall based solely on their thoughtfulness or logic. This forum is still a popularity contest, and there are both winners and losers.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Greyed out comments are still legible. I regularly see people saying things like "I'm sure my comment will be flagged", and days later, it just isn't. Sure, there's a popularity contest - unless you get rid of voting and display-in-vote-order, there always will be. But I would say that paying much attention to that rather than the contents of comments represents a personal choice to be distracted by the noise of the "contest", even while the signal remains in plain sight.
- neutronicus 5y ago
  Rust people tend to love Electron, since (as with most niche programming languages), Electron is arguably its best GUI story
- potiuper 5y ago
  Hatred for misleading headlines outranks hatred of Electron.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Loves Rust? My eyes glaze over whenever rust is mentioned in a headline. At this point rust really isn't novel anymore, it's a language loads of programs use.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  The only Electron apps I use, are doing work time as I have no say in what either employer or customer require me to use. My private computers they are mostly Electron free as far as I can tell, and yes I even pay for Sublime Text.
Zomatree 5y ago
Hi, one of the developers here, we use electron because its hard for our small amount of devs (there are about 4) of us to maintain multiple clients, this is the same reason we use the same web client for mobile.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  People understand this, but they refuse to understand this. I think it's perfectly reasonable for you guys to do it, and I am pretty certain that most of your userbase won't care. Best of luck and thanks for dropping by!
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Did you consider Qt or some other cross-platform native option? There was just recently a HN article [1] on the topic of cross-platform development and UX, with a few alternatives proposed. I think some teams just reach for the Electron tool by default now, instead of weighing each alternative and then choosing it with eyes open. Maybe your team did examine the pros and cons, but it seems the overall software industry is headed toward a simplistic "Cross Platform Client equals Electron" which is disappointing. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28390732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28390732
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Personally, managing a QT application across multiple OSes is itself harder as I’ve spent a lot of time doing platform-specific UI work (eg. fonts on macOS and DPI scaling problems on Windows) compared to Electron. The only similarity was in doing platform-specific tooling for deployments/code signing which is par for the course.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Electron leverages web-style development, which Qt (or GTK or FLTK, or JUCE, or wxwidgets, or libui ... etc) does not manage to do in any real sense. If your dev team thinks in web-like terms, Electron is a more comfortable place to be. Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not.
sam0x17 5y ago
That's odd honestly because there are excellent rust-based bindings for electron
the__alchemist 5y ago
One of the wonderful things about rust is it's a nice, modern language with good performance. Electron will be a performance limiting factor.

jstx1 5y ago

Now I want to know if HN hates Electron more than it loves Rust. Or do they perfectly cancel out?

DiabloD3 5y ago
Electron is MAX_HATE, Rust is MAX_LOVE, but Discord is more Electron than it is anything. As in, I don't care if Rust runs on their servers if Electron runs on my desktop.
- jstx1 5y ago
  Yeah, Electron feels more like a choice that matters.
kingofclams 5y ago
Personally I see “Written in rust” as more of a meme, often using buzzwords like “blazing fast” and “memory safe.” Electron is definitely worse than rust is good.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  > Blazing fast So have you measured it or do you just mean you haven't implemented as many features? -> Usually the latter.
  - stouset 5y ago
    Cynicism aside, from what I’ve seen it’s been the former. See regex and rg by burntsushi as an example.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Don't get me wrong there's a lot of room for speed in programs we use regularly, but I make two observations: 1. Speed is usually found by by people have worked on existing tools in the space, and they don't often make that much of a song and dance about it beyond that theirs is faster. 2. Speed is found in the minds of people not in their tools. When you get past a certain amount of native- ness, you get optimizations by knowing more or having a brilliant insight into the problem rather than using a new meme-language. It might be necessary for certain types of programming but it's not sufficient. Basically I don't like weird meme based marketing of tech. I'm a grumpy old man already and I'm the ripe old age of 20
      - stouset 5y ago
        You were the one that cynically asked if the advertised performance improvements were real or imaginary, not me. To your point, many of the improvements from Rust-based tools appears to come from the ability to express performant semantics safely and elegantly in the language. You could write an equivalent in C, but the Rust one comes naturally, can be expressed at a higher level with better abstractions, and often comes out with top-tier performance before even investing in microoptimizarions (as long as the Big-O performance is in check).
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Is Rust as blazing fast as Electron is slow?
  - grishka 5y ago
    But Rust runs on the server while Electron runs on the client. You can't compare them like that!
  - ginko 5y ago
    Rust is about as fast as C++, so I'd call that normal speed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pizza234 5y ago
    Electron is not necessarily slow - see Visual Studio Code; it's certainly not as reactive as Sublime Text, but it's fast/reactive enough.
    - Griffinsauce 5y ago
      I know, it was a (admittedly vague) joke. People rag on Electron with the same shallowness as they praise Rust. I bet you can make slow things in Rust. It's all a soup of trade-offs, resource management and hype.
- curun1r 5y ago
  I’ve always seen “written in Rust” as relevant for a specific sort of software. Because CVEs are inevitable in C/C++ software and dealing with CVEs has become part of the user interface to that software. Knowing something is “written in Rust” means its attack surface is much smaller. Working in tech, the “drop everything and migrate to a version that isn’t vulnerable” instances are far too common and disruptive. But as soon as you get into consumer software with auto-update mechanisms and an expectation that end users won’t be computer professionals who know how to read a CVE and evaluate its urgency, the “written in Rust” distinction becomes a mostly irrelevant implementation detail. Or, worse, it’s an indication that the GUI will feel wrong in some way because the Rust community seems averse to writing GUIs with GTK, UI Kit and whatever the hell Microsoft recommends using for Windows these days.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Electron is definitely worse than rust is good." I would say, it depends very much on the developer. There are probably only a handful of people, who can write a fast GUI in C/++ that is also safe, plattform independent - and a joy to use. (I am definitely not among them) But there are a ton of devs, knowing how to accomplish it - with the webtoolkit. In other words, I indeed would prefer a electron app, over some hacked together GUI in a "performant" language. Security, performance - and UX wise.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Thankfully there is no C++ on Electron.
- jasonhansel 5y ago
  The issue is that the alternatives to Electron--GUI frameworks that use native controls--are so hard to use and inconsistent that Electron seems good by comparison.
cartoonworld 5y ago
Discord is not bad for me wrt resource usage, but it wasn't always good and it had problems. I've been impressed by their development. The Revolt.chat SPA looks decent, if featureless, and will probably be fine as the project progresses. This has just launched its beta, after all.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Ah, the monolithic HN myth again. That's right, let's just ignore that this place has thousands of readers, thousands of commenters, and that there's no thing called "HN" to talk about as it if had intentionality and/or opinion.
- xeromal 5y ago
  There definitely are trends on HN and while they don't fit a 100% of the population, they drive a lot of the opinions and discourse.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Sometimes folks probably feel HN has three people: the person, the people that agree with the person, the people that disagree with the person. Four, if you count moderaters (who I imagine are cooler than Robocop). Okay, enough navel gazing for me!
- rectang 5y ago
  While the readership may be large and diverse, there is nevertheless a Hacker News zeitgeist, especially due to the way downvoting causes comments to be greyed out. The acceptable range of discourse does not extend to anything non-flaggable, and comments do not stand or fall based solely on their thoughtfulness or logic. This forum is still a popularity contest, and there are both winners and losers.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Greyed out comments are still legible. I regularly see people saying things like "I'm sure my comment will be flagged", and days later, it just isn't. Sure, there's a popularity contest - unless you get rid of voting and display-in-vote-order, there always will be. But I would say that paying much attention to that rather than the contents of comments represents a personal choice to be distracted by the noise of the "contest", even while the signal remains in plain sight.
neutronicus 5y ago
Rust people tend to love Electron, since (as with most niche programming languages), Electron is arguably its best GUI story
potiuper 5y ago
Hatred for misleading headlines outranks hatred of Electron.
noobermin 5y ago
Loves Rust? My eyes glaze over whenever rust is mentioned in a headline. At this point rust really isn't novel anymore, it's a language loads of programs use.
pjmlp 5y ago
The only Electron apps I use, are doing work time as I have no say in what either employer or customer require me to use. My private computers they are mostly Electron free as far as I can tell, and yes I even pay for Sublime Text.

Zomatree 5y ago

Hi, one of the developers here, we use electron because its hard for our small amount of devs (there are about 4) of us to maintain multiple clients, this is the same reason we use the same web client for mobile.

arcturus17 5y ago
People understand this, but they refuse to understand this. I think it's perfectly reasonable for you guys to do it, and I am pretty certain that most of your userbase won't care. Best of luck and thanks for dropping by!
ryandrake 5y ago
Did you consider Qt or some other cross-platform native option? There was just recently a HN article [1] on the topic of cross-platform development and UX, with a few alternatives proposed. I think some teams just reach for the Electron tool by default now, instead of weighing each alternative and then choosing it with eyes open. Maybe your team did examine the pros and cons, but it seems the overall software industry is headed toward a simplistic "Cross Platform Client equals Electron" which is disappointing. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28390732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28390732
- judge2020 5y ago
  Personally, managing a QT application across multiple OSes is itself harder as I’ve spent a lot of time doing platform-specific UI work (eg. fonts on macOS and DPI scaling problems on Windows) compared to Electron. The only similarity was in doing platform-specific tooling for deployments/code signing which is par for the course.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Electron leverages web-style development, which Qt (or GTK or FLTK, or JUCE, or wxwidgets, or libui ... etc) does not manage to do in any real sense. If your dev team thinks in web-like terms, Electron is a more comfortable place to be. Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not.

sam0x17 5y ago

That's odd honestly because there are excellent rust-based bindings for electron

the__alchemist 5y ago

One of the wonderful things about rust is it's a nice, modern language with good performance. Electron will be a performance limiting factor.