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Comment by cco | Hacker News Reader

I can't fathom why slack is so slow, on MacOS i see a channel that is white, new messages await. I click it, and honest to God sometimes seconds pass while slack loads the _text_.

How can this be? How could my slack client with a 30 Mbps connection have received the signal that there was a new message but also not downloaded the few bytes of text as well. Maybe it did but a MacBook pro from 2018 takes seconds to render text? AOL or MSN didn't back in the day.

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Electron.

The trade off between packaging a html/css website as a standalone app in it's own standalone web browser minus toolbar vs apps using native toolkits such as AOL or MSN.

It's very easy to make a nice application with Electron, but very hard to make one that actually is large and compatible.

I mean the system requirements for AOL Instant messenger in 2008 was 300 MHz CPU, 256 RAM, and 250MB of hd space. Compare that to Slack - they don't list the system requirements but I am sure you all know it probably demands at least 1gb of RAM and will use all of it:

https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor...

Let's face it we are reaching a new dark-age of computer programming away from static typing and caring about performance to a hellscape of ECMA script...

https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32

That's not entirely it. VS Code is Electron (not to mention doing a lot more) and somehow its faster than slack and uses about the same memory.

I think the problem with basing anything off of Electron is that the stack is just too daym high and depends on so many things out of your control. Not to mention Google owns you and your application and could add stuff to Chrome that snoops on your users...

It becomes impossible for you to do any sort of quality - even making the original choice to use it means you care about the perceived "convenience" of using CSS and ECMA over performance.

You're comparing a software that runs locally to a service that runs mostly through the network. A fairer comparison to vscode would be emacs.

Suboptimal code might have something to do with it as well, though.

What about vscode remote? That's how I'm doing it. Everything is over the network for the most part.

I'd guess it's a design where the boolean notification that there is a new message travels separately from the payload.

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