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points by Kuyawa 2 days ago | 0 comments

The app size also went from 10 GB to 10 MB, start time went from 10 secs to 10 ms

Goodbye Electron, we barely knew you

I wonder where the 10GB come from. Quick check on Flatpak shows 240 MB download and 568 MB installed size for the Linux install.

https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.discordapp.Discord

[–] pjmlp 2 days ago

I really hope with hardware prices going back to the last century, we finally get some best practices back.

[–] markbao 2 days ago

Misinformation. Discord isn’t 10GB and nobody outside Discord has actually used the Rust port.

[–] hendrikmans 2 days ago

Source?

[–] nticompass 2 days ago

It's a joke.

[–] RunSet 2 days ago

In a perfect world it would be reduced to 0 MB.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

[–] asimovDev 2 days ago

they recently added google searchability or something adjacent to that. I received a lot of pings in various discord servers about it being opt-out and that by default my messages are searchable now apparently

[–] hn773746483 2 days ago

Discord even sends its DPO (data protection officer/privacy team) tickets to outsourced offshore copy & paste template support farms/AI chatbots. I've requested my data numerous times, half of the time the ticket was closed without a response, and the ones that DID get a response were the same copy & paste template telling me my data package is being generated.

All data packages were missing 90% of my account data (bug? size issue with zip files?), no avenue to report this to Discord of course, because the only words their "privacy team" know is... :^)

I was going to paste exactly what they sent me, but it turns out some of my data request tickets have been deleted by them.

[–] gear54rus 2 days ago

you must be joking 10GB haha

who downloads this? there's a website available

[–] saghm 2 days ago

Push-to-talk does not work well on in the browser at least on Wayland/Linux. The shortcut only gets sent to the active window, which for the type of contexts where push-to-talk is useful (e.g. gaming) is a dealbreaker. I've read stuff indicating that xdotool can manually handle things reasonably enough on X11, but I was never able to get it working reliably for any of the various Wayland replacements for xdotool, so when I've done voice calls, I've had to grudgingly use the desktop client.

[–] TingPing 2 days ago

A standard exists for Wayland apps. https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...

[–] saghm 2 days ago

I get a 404 for that link.

[–] chandlerswift 2 days ago

Perhaps https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr... ? From a quick skim of the page it's not immediately obvious if that actually will allow PTT to work, though; I'm only suspecting that because I don't see any of its siblings that would even conceivably allow for PTT.

[–] saghm 12 hours ago

No clue if it's possible or not. I was not able to find any way to do it when I last checked around a year ago, but maybe something has changed since then, or maybe it just isn't implemented in Firefox yet.

[–] nonethewiser 2 days ago

What the fuck. That's amazing. 10GB->10MB can't simply be moving from Electron right?

[–] sgarland 2 days ago

This has to be hyperbole. I built (with Claude) a P2P LAN voice-only chat app in Rust recently, using native frameworks for each platform (Swift, GTK, Win32), and it weighs in at about 5-6 MB depending on the platform. I have spent an enormous amount of time looking for places to squeeze it further. It has ephemeral channels and password protection, but that’s about it: no text chat, no video, no friends, no blocklists, no concept of servers, etc. I can’t imagine everything else Discord has squeezes into another 5 MB.

[–] pjmlp 2 days ago

Electron is a full Chrome instance, plus whatever else makes up the application.

[–] nonethewiser 2 days ago

Yes, and that only explains about 150MB.

If it were simply the Chrome install that would imply Electron is 9GB+ by itself, which it most certainly is not.

[–] chii 2 days ago

It's probably left over old instances and updates that werent deleted properly. These apps tend to download the update as an entire bundle, rather than any sort of binary diff and patch.

Therefore, if you have an old install and have gone thru several (many) cycles of updates, the installation directory could be riddled with old versions and update files that make up the bulk of that 10 gig.

[–] flykespice 1 day ago

That is horrible, is it really that common that electron apps eventually consume all your storage with each update?

[–] chii 1 day ago

if the app cleaned up the update properly, then no. For example, signal desktop is fine.

I dont have discord, so what i said is just conjecture, but bad update files laying around isn't uncommon imho.

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

It can and it does, because it drops a ton of code for scenarios that do not exist. (Not these numbers, of course, but if you check the comments of that account.. well. Yeah. Some kid)

Electron rose to fame because one could just do everything with it and it was good enough.

Being able to do everything also means that the thing can do everything everywhere all at once, which is many lines of code.

___

The magic of electron was that it was "cheap", however, with code being all AI-generated, that's even cheaper. So now everything will be some slop rust until the point when people realize that there is a cost to be paid after all.

For electron, that has been RAM and performance. For the vibeslop.. well. We shall see.

[–] delta_p_delta_x 2 days ago

Unironically, with LLMs, everyone should be looking to cut their system resource consumption (memory, disk, network, GPU, I/O traffic in general) and rewrite everything natively. Have a platform-independent business logic layer, and a platform-dependent UI/UX layer. Done. It's not even that hard, and has been done several times over; we quite literally have MVC/MVVM/etc that were invented two decades ago.

Operating systems developers should be looking to profile everything. Benchmarking and profiling used to be horribly time-consuming; nowadays, with agents, this is almost trivial. Then valuable engineer time can be spent looking at actually solving and optimising the workloads, from the kernel, to drivers, to user-mode libraries, to vendored applications.

About a decade ago programming was expensive, and we decided writing everything in JavaScript was OK, and wasted everyone's memory instead of using programmer time to write fast and efficient native applications. This is no longer the case.

[–] throwitaway222 2 days ago

Yeah I have to agree here - the days of being scared of complete rewrites are pretty much over.

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

> Unironically, with LLMs, everyone should be looking to cut their system resource consumption (memory, disk, network, GPU, I/O traffic in general) and rewrite everything natively.

Depends.

There is a lot of value in man-made software where the man knows exactly what happened where when why.

If you just revibe in rust, you get something that works at this point in time, but this deep architectural knowledge is completely lost and you're at the mercy of Dario not locking down your account for wrongthink.

That can still be fine for smaller tools where the cost of recreating them from scratch is alright, but revibing your core business thingy is likely a horrible idea, which I encourage people to do, as I'd love to have the business opportunity to take over their frustrated customerbase ca 5 years from now.

[–] delta_p_delta_x 2 days ago

I don't think we should just 're-vibe' it as you put it. Naturally the rewrite should be progressive and thoughtful, backed by test-driven development at all levels, and regression tests every step of the way. To reiterate: writing code used to be a lot more expensive, which justified foisting React, Electron, JS on everyone. No longer the case.

I've mentioned in another comment, but my biggest pet peeve is that AI agent applications (Claude, GPT, etc) are themselves just Electron wrappers over their web pages. What a waste.

[–] nonethewiser 2 days ago

>and you're at the mercy of Dario not locking down your account for wrongthink.

Inference cannot be controlled. The models are already out there. It's too late.

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

Good luck doing the full-hands-off one-shot revibe stuff this all is referring to with GLM-5.3.

That needs claude-like capabilities.

It also should not be done at all. But that approach needs it.

Using open weights models like GLM-5.3 can also speed up rewriting, but then you're rewriting and not revibing, which is a lot slower.

[–] upcoming-sesame 2 days ago

npm memes https://programmerhumor.io/javascript-memes/javascript-exper...