Why Is Slack Still So Terrible? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Slack Still So Terrible?

ilikekillnerds.com

11 pointsFiveplus11 comments

The answer: Electron. Always.

What is also baffling is that a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees is unable to create a cross-platform native desktop app, yet it takes ONE PERSON [0] to create a desktop client for Slack and Discord. The fact that Slack is already 'optimising' Electron via offloading / rewriting JS code in C++ / Rust tells me that JS will never give them the performance requirements they need.

For Slack there are no more excuses to try the Qt option.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

what language is ripcord written in?

C++

I think the "Search is broken" point hints towards the author using Slack in a different way to me. I rarely search. I don't even have conversations about things I'd want to search later in Slack. I use Slack exclusively for things that are ephemeral - for things like checking in with my team or getting an opinion about something - if there's actual technical decisions being made or useful information being shared I pull that stuff out to Clubhouse or Github or an email.

Maybe if I was more invested in Slack and doing more things in it than just chat I'd agree that it's bad, but right now I don't mind it.

It's also still very slow. But apparently not slow enough for anyone to do anything about it. We seem to have just accepted sluggish UIs these days.

Everything the author is complaining about is done even more poorly on Teams, which is the de facto “modern” communication solution in the enterprise.

Why is Slack still an Electron app? I stopped using it because it's so slow. Native apps are fast.

Whether an app is fast or not is usually down to the person who wrote it and their skill in optimizing code rather than the technology it was made with. For example, VSCode is Electron and it's pretty fast out of the box (so long as you've not weighed it down with plugins).

You do have a point, but what about the combined overhead one suffers from running a lot of Electron apps all at once?

This year, I dumped all of the Electron apps I used to use. I have also stopped developing for the browser altogether (I learned Swift and Metal for the project I'm working on), and my MacBook Pro is truly an unladen swallow now.

You're mostly right, although people tend to hold VSCode up as an example and I don't personally find it to be fast app but it's fast in the context of Electron apps.

the one-eyed man is king

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