Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM (theverge.com)

On the netbook, well.. CWM, UXterm, Dillo, CLI/TUI mail, usenet, IRC and so on clients, groff, nsxiv, mpv, MuPDF... it runs snappier than the NUC for what it does. Programming? Golang for networking stuff -security, not like Rust, but far better than C-, simple C99 for small software, or S9/JimTCL. Otter Browser for emergencies (JS pages from public institutions/govts in my country).

If a model can tell you anything you’d hope to have a human tell you, what’s the difference? It’s a different point of failure— models can go offline, but employees can also quit anytime too.

who downloads this? there's a website available

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

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

> It’s not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”

soon™

And yeah, The Verge was one of my favorite resources earlier too but I've stopped visiting it due to subscription requirement on most articles.

Of course, being the Teams org they'd likely still find a way to end up with a bloated mess even after a Rust rewrite.

While you _should_ put some effort into tuning and fixing these things for your specific project, you will "mostly" get things like cross-platform support for all major desktop operating systems, some support for accessibility-tools like screen readers and voice over, devtools and debuggers, application installers, (push) notifications, caching, some aspects of security and cryptography, log handling, and file handling for free, or at least get a reasonable push in the right direction, with Electron.

The alternative is either getting each of these things from a different third party source, or making them all in-house. With a popular abstraction layer like Electron + a web stack, you will to some extent encounter the same problems, mysterious log messages, design considerations and other issues as everyone else. This means that you can find documentation, stack overflow questions, new hires, consultants, blogs, LLMs, etc. that have the skills and knowledge you need, instead of researching and solving everything in-house.

I think what we're seeing here - and likely to continue to see - is new versions of web UI that eschew a lot of the historical baggage given they don't need to support older websites. And possibly something more powerful. So I guess re-writes or partial ports that take only the parts we need. Presumably a bunch of people will try and hopefully, a few succeed.

I'd like to know it. I don't think that it can be substantially better. You have to compromise between the amount of customization you are allowed to do and the amount of options you have to pick values for.

I can't vouch for GPUI, I don't know how good its compromise is, but it bears enough similarities to other modern UI-toolkits. I don't think there is a better way, but if you know one, I'd like to know about it.

And, well, don't forget, it is a front-page example, that is not necessarily an example how one should compose their code, it demonstrates what you can do with GPUI. In real life code you'd probably move those children's construction into separate named functions, maybe you'd use some predefined styles to apply to individual elements, instead of picking fg/bg/text-colors, maybe sizes and some other attributes for each one explicitly, and maybe some other tricks.

Your example would look like this:

    export component Hello inherits Rectangle {
        in property <string> text: "World";
        width: 500px; height: 500px;
        background: #505050;
        border-width: 1px; border-color: blue;
        drop-shadow-blur: 15px; drop-shadow-color: #0008;
        VerticalLayout {
            alignment: center; spacing: 12px;
            Text { text: "Hello, \{root.text}!"; font-size: 20px; color: white; horizontal-alignment: center; }
            HorizontalLayout {
                alignment: center; spacing: 8px;
                for c in [#f00, #0f0, #00f, #ff0, #000, #fff]: Rectangle { width: 32px; height: 32px; background: c; }
            }
        }
    }
    

Also, this is basically what Tailwind code looks like.

But.. maybe, maybe this is the opposite of google translate in the 00's - maybe, if you keep porting back and forth, you will eventually arrive at perfection :P