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Comment by markatkinson | Hacker News Reader

I would rather there was more competition for Steam to be honest. Discord may hit a spot where the functionality required of the app pushes it into a territory where it becomes a resource hog and justifies a rewrite in C++ or C#, but we don't really have insight into why they ran with Electron to begin with. We should be considerate of that fact that not everyone can drum up a team of C++ engineers to create a suave product in a hurry and at the right price.

Basically my point is let's wait and see and give them the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective its an incredible piece of software, front end and back. It's stunning. We get 100% of the product for free, and those that pay get 105%.

Also it is still quite young. With time some of your issues will likely be ironed out, or it may turn into a mess.

I do agree with it feeling a bit cluttered now.

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I don’t get the Electron hate, Visual Studio Code is probably the best IDE I’ve ever used, and it runs much better than eclipse or even Visual Studio ever did.

Saying this is a little unfair to Visual Studio, but it’s just so bad when you’re in an enterprise setup where you don’t really have a local drive. Visual Studio code on the other hand doesn’t care if your windows profile is on one network drive and your code is on another. Which is a little ironic because I think you’ll see code more in small setups and regular studio more in enterprise.

Anyway, I think electron apps work fairly well. I don’t like discord, the company, but discord itself works and feels a lot better than Skype, teams peak or ventrilo.

Visual Studio Code is a unicorn, an exception to rule.

We at least know that decent apps can be built with it, but for some reason, they aren't. There is a pit of failure somewhere. Maybe the JavaScript eco-system? Sludge hammers for thumbtacks?

Is it a unicorn? Atom is the second best “IDE” I’ve used. :p

I also think slack and simple note work really well, and I already mentioned Discord.

So I’m not really sure where it got it’s bad rep. Maybe because it’s JavaScript and people hate that?

Atom is quite the heavyweight compared to VSC, especially once you load in a few plugins.

Atleast about a year back when I used it, Atom quickly filled up about 8GB of RAM for a moderately sized project in Go plus all necessary plugins.

VSC is fast but no lightweight either and hogs some resources.

It's not inherently a problem with Javascript, usually it's some framework like React being misused as usual inducing a lot of GC activity on top of unnecessary memory bloat.

I work in the public sector, you wouldn’t believe how many terrible programs I see each year. They are made in C++, C#, Swift, Java and so on, but you wouldn’t find me blaming WPF because someone didn’t know how to use it. :p

There are a lot of great electron apps, that frankly don’t have non-electron equals, so it obviously works. Yet it somehow always gets hit with these “well c++ could have done it better”.

Maybe it’s true, but if the biggest problem with electron is people using a framework wrong. Then what makes you think they’d do a better job in c++?

They use too many resources (both CPU and RAM) relative to the functionality that they offer.

VSC is not the exception that proves the rule. VSC is the counterexample that disproves the rule.

Slow electron apps come from a culture of not caring about performance. It's not a technical problem but a values problem. C++ developers _tend_ to care more about resource usage. Any GUI will be slow if the developers stop caring about repaints, even one written in C++.

C++ GUIs are fast because people sit in front of profilers and make them fast. Not because C++ is a magical language where every operation takes less than 16ms. Chromium has great profiling tools available. The chromium team has put a lot of effort into making performance tools available and then people ignore them and say that it sucks.

> I don’t like discord, the company

I'm curious, can you expand on that? I hear a lot about how much people love Discord, but haven't heard much (good or bad) about the company itself. They seem to be in the best position to compete with Steam though, which is hard to say the least.

They collect massive amounts of user data. I’m not a fan of that, even if they haven’t yet decided what to do with it.

Why not the company? I am not really familiar with any controversy around Discord, I just use the software for chatting to my mates.

> I would rather there was more competition for Steam to be honest.

I don't want yet another Steam or Netflix competitor. I just want to use Steam and Netflix solely. Or to be more precise: I want interoperability between these platforms.

The beauty of an open protocol such as IRC meant they anyone could use any IRC compatible client. XMPP had the same advantage.

Unfortunately there is too much friction being generated by Valve's continued 30% commission and lack of curation/barriers to store entry for that to be the case.

100% free if you don't mind that it tracks the hell out of you.

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