<story><title>Migrating Slack&apos;s Desktop App to BrowserView</title><url>https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-desktop-app-to-browserview-2759690d9c7b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise.&lt;p&gt;Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>outworlder</author><text>Indeed.&lt;p&gt;Some posters seem to think that, because you CAN build a chat app consuming a few megabytes of RAM, it means you should and it&amp;#x27;s practical. It&amp;#x27;s like pointing to 64KB demoscene games and saying &amp;quot;see, you can write a game in 64KB, why does this one take multiple gigabytes&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Well, by all means, create a Slack competitor in hand-optimized assembly if you wish. Or whatever else you prefer (Rust?). If it&amp;#x27;s a better product, it may take over market share. Assuming your users even care about that. Hint: most are not obsessing over TOP, Activity Monitor, or whatever your OS uses.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, don&amp;#x27;t whine. Electron makes it possible to create and ship apps very very quickly. Apps which would not exist otherwise. Every time you remove a barrier, you open up doors for more people.&lt;p&gt;While spinning up an entire browser for a single app has memory usage implications – namely, the baseline consumption is high, as is download size – the biggest issue is that it is easy to be wasteful when using web technologies. Look at Visual Studio Code, for instance. It&amp;#x27;s light and nimble compared to alternatives. It&amp;#x27;s true that a single one of its workers consume as much memory as a whole Emacs instance, but the development pace is staggering. And it still uses less memory than Slack...</text></comment>
<story><title>Migrating Slack&apos;s Desktop App to BrowserView</title><url>https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-desktop-app-to-browserview-2759690d9c7b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise.&lt;p&gt;Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peoplewindow</author><text>Why? Electron apps still have to be packaged for Linux. And cross platform apps can be written in Qt or Java too. Doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like Electron is the thing making the difference here.</text></comment>