“Hey Claude, rewrite our dogshit Electron app in Rust, make no mistakes”.
Vibe coded i guess?
I get why vibe coders love Rust - it’s a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot if rustc is checking your lifetimes, but holy shit is the code I’ve seen from them the most unholy mess. Rust is difficult enough to read at the best of times but LLMs don’t even bother with any kind of module structure. Just thousands of lines of vomit in single files and a worrying amount of
unsafe.Honestly sounds like LLMs have learned that from half the rust projects I’d seen before the LLM craze lol
And this will probably give rust a bad name if most of the code is horrid vibe coded stuff. (Cuck coded?)
99% of new Rust projects today are vibe coded, so probably yeah
With screensharing on wayland? With screensharing on wayland, right?
Good to see. Electron is trash for a few reasons.
I think that the headline says more about Electron than it does about Rust.
Yeah exactly. “Just” 240 MB, it’s still a lot for a glorified chat app
240 is quite little considering how much media there’s in it
Windows 98 required far less disk space and was a complete operating system - that is if you consider Win98 an operating system…
SP2 was aight
Perhaps it’s vibecoded slop?
Anything new coming from any non-bootstrapped company is likely slop, and even the bootstrapped deserve a second look
Rust apps seem to always be on the heavy side, maybe depends how much debug info they leave in
I once played around with reverse engineering a Rust program. I compiled the optimized version of the standard “hello world” program which somehow turned into 50,000 lines of assembly.
It looked like it copied over dozens of functions from libc and the data section was filled with every single possible error string “file not found”, “connection timed out”, etc. as if there was a possibility of hello world generating an access denied error.
Rust has static linking, you get the necessary (and some unnecessary) parts of the standard library in your binary instead of the user having to install the library the way you have to have a libc installed. Makes for fatter binaries but much easier compatibility.
Was your C
hello worldprogram statically linked? I believe Rust includes its libraries whereas the typicalhello worlddoes not. Static linkage generally brings in large amounts of unused code.
Indeed, they’re probably shipping a backtrace symboliser, and since there’s no system-wide equivalent of libc to link against, they’ll be including the entire Rust standard library with the binary too.
My other hunch is the Krisp noise cancellation ML model is a huge chunk of the memory footprint.
Krisp shouldn’t be running when you ain’t on a VC tho, I neve use VCs tbh and still get crazy numbers
Even the guys who invented Electron (developers of the Atom text editor) stopped using it years ago and switched to Rust when writing their new editor, Zed, and its UI framework GPUI (which Discord will be using too).
Maybe we don’t want to use JavaScript for literally everything.
It’s great to see it. I wonder how much of this push comes from the high price of memory.
Discord is as much spyware as anything else. Its efficiency in using my computer’s resouces in order to log everything about me, build a dossier on me and sell me out at every opportunity is not a consideration, as I view it as something to be avoided like Meta, et al.
That said, Electron does suck.
Anything else? Nah bro. It’s as much spyware as Google chat or Whatsapp… But Matrix, XMPP, mumble, etc are not spyware (sure, if your host is the CIA maybe, but with these software you can be your own host if you want. No spying guaranteed.)
I’m pretty sure this is just an experiment:
- Don’t break anything that works
- The website version of the app can’t be replaced
- The normal discord app is not that memory hungry it’s usually below 1 GB for me, maybe consider optimizing your existing codebase?
- A web based client allows for easier customization, better styling and easier creation of modifications
The existing app is based on electron. It pretty much can’t be optimised unless you manage to greatly reduce the footprint of Chromium itself.
How will this affect the vesktop users
TL;DR: vesktop will probably no longer work (unless they wanna mantain the client themselves…) and vencord will likely only work as a userscript in your browser.
It probably won’t, but honestly there aren’t that many features the desktop client has that you can’t just get by using the browser webapp (Keyboard shortcuts, and the “now playing” feature that is a privacy mess, are the two biggest ones that come to mind right now)
Being its own icon on the taskbar would be one I’d miss.
man I love that they are ditching electron but, they “just” fixed the discord linux client to properly update and now they are rehauling it? can’t wait to get this update 3 years from now.
I got frustrated enough with the weirdness of the Linux client that I eventually ended up using a pinned browser tab.
At least then the data collection monstrosity is sandboxed. I believe Flatpak helps, too.
It’s great, but I wonder what happens with the linux client? There is no mention of it in the article.
Do we get optimized native client or is that too much work if they don’t have universal framework anymore?
Marketing director of Discord on Reddit says linux will have a native client.
They are using GPUI. Rust native UI framework from the Zed IDE team. I think the creator of Zed is the one who created Electron in the first place, then left. I’m not sure though.
So it should be cross platform
It’s a bold strategy. “Electron sucks! Let’s see what else these people made”.
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
People use Discord for a lot of things. A lot of people use it to stream and watch streams.
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
Because rendering things is quite literally the reason GPUs exist, it takes load off the CPU and is more efficient at it to boot.
It’s a video player. You want GPU acceleration.
What video? 99.99479% of my Discord experience is text.
What video? 99.99479% of my Discord experience is text.
Really depends on the server. The servers I use are driving incredibly rich media: like animated images, video clips, and streaming.
A lot of people talk and stream to their friends. If I only needed a text app, I would not use discord at all.
Do you like having battery?
Because without it UI changes create CPU spikes
You ever use a Swiss Army knife to open a letter? It’s a lot of extra shit you don’t need but it’s there anyways.
Why are people on Lemmy using discord?
Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware I had to forego all traditional social media applications to use federated ones. 🙄
I’m friends with normal people.
Because thats what people use
That’s the only reason I use it
It’s actually really difficult to get your friends to switch over little things like ‘being a spy platform’, and ‘leaking tens of thousands of users private information’.
People probably voice chat with their friends, I don’t think Lemmy has that feature?
I also use it for socializing. Basically a collection of giant instant messaging groups.
To manage my community more easly and interact with many others aswell plus every friend of my uses it.
There is no alternative currently that offers a granular permission system like discord’s, voice chat and streaming that doesn’t also suck in other aspects
To easily chat and stream with friends
It’s a mainstream platform, so many non-Lemmy people are still there.
Besides, it’s always worth the praise when someone makes good technical decisions that benefit users.
Things I want are held hostage on Discord. If I want to play Motorstorm online, I look at the fan server channel and it has real time lobby stats and chat rooms to get some games going. Just an example. My friends usually use Steam for voice chat.
Desire?
Someone at work with much more political power, and much less knowledge of how dangerous surveillance capitalism is, insists on using it 'cause they use it all the time and it’s functional.
:(
