There're IRC clients that do half of that (unless IRC got audio and video support at some point) using < 1% of RAM or CPU...
Interestingly, Messages.app on macOS actually is a webview (well, the chat log portion of the window).
do you have a source?
A quick glance at the view hierarchy (Accessibility Inspector.app can do this) shows that the chat view is just a web view.
Interesting! Thanks :)
Yeah, but it doesn't run on my PC, or my phone, or in a browser.
I don't need it to run in a browser or PC, and it works on my phone since I have an iPhone. You needs may vary, in which case you might just stick to SMS which is cross-platform and lightweight.
You can control people's screens through Messages? And you can write simple webhooks and bots with a few lines of Ruby? Please send me some links, I'd love to do that.
As to web hooks and bots, if you really think that necessitates having it be a bloated Electron app, I don't know what to say.
AppleScript is still a thing, right?
Yeah, it is, but I definitely wouldn't call it a webhook / bot alternative. Having used AS with Messages.app before, it definitely isn't very useful for anything but very basic stuff.