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Comment by j16sdiz | Hacker News Reader

It is Qt-based, not electron

At least on Mac, Telegram has mysteriously two apps in Mac App Store, one is Electron and one is native. I never know which is which

One is named "Telegram" and one is "Telegram for Desktop" and they have exactly the same icon, but different sets of features.

edit: I was wrong, neither of the two is Electron, see below

Telegram for Desktop is https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop (Qt, open source stuff)

Telegram is https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift (Swift, Core* libraries)

Both are native.

Oh. In that case, I was wrong. I still don't understand the need for two official apps though

If I recall correctly one was created by a non-Telegram dev as a bit of a fanproject, and eventually adopted by the company as a pseudo-official app. At some point actual Telegram devs decided to create (I think) Telegram for Desktop based on native stuff like Swift. But both applications get bugfixes and updates because it's easy enough to maintain both.

Telegram at least used to support a second non-official client.

Lately, IIRC, they have made huge chunks of their core app available as a library to simplify the creation of more clients.

Calling either of those "native" is a bit of a conceit, since both reimplement standard system controls and eschew the use of system frameworks such as Cocoa.

The Swift app and the original Objective-C app are native.

Again, they are native only in that they run native code and use the bare minimum Cocoa (Touch) controls that they are required to do by the system. Everything else is reimplemented, rather poorly IMO.

>they are native only in that they run native code

so... native. I'm glad everyone agrees then.

> so... native.

No. You're missing the bit where "native" means different things in different contexts; for code it means that the code ends up being compiled for the architecture it's running on, but for UI it means that you're using the platform APIs and following system conventions, which Telegram does not.

I'm not missing it, I just don't care. The only think of interest to me is whether its a shitty memory hog like Teams or other electron programs or not. I don't think I use a single program that uses Cocoa aside from Activiy Monitor.

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