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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully they raise enough money to build a native desktop app.

200 KB native Slack client. A polished public beta will be finally released on Feb 7. Also supports Skype, Twitter, Telegram... almost everything.

It was delayed by 9 months. Sorry to thousands of people who have been subscribed and waiting for news.

I'll release a detailed post explaining what I've been working on and what caused the delay.

Also super excited about the language I created to develop Volt. Compiles 15 million lines of code per second and can be translated to from C/C++. I've successfully ported DOOM and (almost) DOOM 3 while making build time 120 times faster.

This is really interesting and I'd be excited to use it if the memory usage is even half that of the official Slack client. Bookmarked.

Right now it has ~10% of Slack's usage for the same chats.

Not surprising. Hopefully this helps rebut people who say things like that Slack has to be that big because its complicated and caches messages for performance.

Where can I read about this language?

I found this page on the site https://volt.ws/lang but it's quite thin on detail.

200 KB, now that's more like what a chat client should take! Even excluding the browser "runtime" I think Slack's JS itself is bigger than that.

I say this as someone who wrote a 20KB MSNP8 (MSN Messenger) client for personal use many years ago --- it's not that hard to keep your code size down and performance up, even if you custom-draw everything so it looks like the browser Slack client.

May I ask, since I noticed your username, if you are Russian? It seems a lot of other non-bloated tools I use come from Russian programmers...

Yes, I am :) Might be a cultural thing. We like simple and efficient solutions.

I just want to mention that the download links don't work yet (I'm assuming since you have not launched) but they look like they should work. You should have some indication on the webpage as well. Very interested in this product after skype finally forced the upgrade to the electron version a week ago. Can't wait to try it out. Thanks and all the best

edit totally missed the "coming soon"...

I really wanted to like this (remember when it was called Eul and built with Go, even recommended it to friends and coworkers) - I spent months following the GitHub repo, looking forward to seeing the code I imagined would inspire the Go community.. but the author sadly do certain things that comes off as untrustworthy, such as promising to open source but failing to do so even after a year, renaming the project without warning/announcement, letting the homepage redirect to spam (possibly malware), tons of AV (hopefully falsely) flagging the apps, etc.

.im domains need to be renewed 3 days before expiration. I had a bad habit of renewing my domains 1-2 days before the deadline. So I lost it. Lesson learned.

I decided to change the name to Volt and set up a redirect to volt.ws 1 month before expiration.

This should have been announced, yes.

AV were flagging the app because I compressed it with UPX, which I no longer do, and because it wasn't signed (it is now).

But in general yes, huge delays and not much communication from my part. That's not going to happen any more, I'll post a detailed blog about it.

I don't see how you owe any explanation to a non-paying client. Please don't feed the freeloaders. They always set new standards.

Is there any documentation on the language? Is it something akin to Zig? [https://ziglang.org/]

There's some info here: https://volt.ws/lang

Some ideas are similar, yes.

>It was delayed by 9 months

reasons? why wouldn't i expect the same going forward in the future? 9 month delay on a closer source app=no for me ever using it

also your download links don't work, way to clickbait people into signing up for your email list

Is that mailing list for Volt also the place to find out more about V the language? It sounds and looks really interesting!

For now yes. I'll create a separate website and communities for V in April.

It's so mean to give us big juicy download links below a little grey `(coming soon)` =)

> so I spent two weeks in October 2017 to create a very light and minimalistic language that can seamlessly interop with C

> V compiler is written in V.

> can be translated to from C/C++. An automatic translator supports the latest standards of these languages.

> incremental build system,

Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?

Hi Andy,

I wrote the original version in Go in 2 weeks. Half a year later I spent 2-3 weeks to re-write it in V. It's very small.

Your language has been submitted to Hacker News here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086712

Just letting you know in case you want to respond to comments, including mine. ;)

You mean three native desktop apps.

Qt /thread

Qt is not native.

Native doesn't mean "it's not written in JS" or "it's fast". Native means "it uses the GUI toolkit of the target platform". And Qt doesn't do that, it merely mimics its appearance.

GTK isn't any more "native" than Qt -- they're both abstractions atop X (or Wayland, or Broadway).

You are incorrect. Toolkits like Qt are exactly what people are talking about when they say "native". How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives? Did you even know they exist? How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

>How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

So because Microsoft has lowered the bar, now everything can be called "native"? There's a reason many people hate UWP.

Not using native Win32 HWND based controls does not imply UWP. Virtually every program that was made for Windows XP and later does not use native Win32 controls; this includes “outdated” frameworks like WinForms.

X11 and Win32 UI are actually fairly similar in this respect.

Actually the VCL[1], shipped with Delphi, does to a large extent use the native Win32 controls. They've added some quality of life stuff on top of them, but the TEdit component[2] is a wrapper around the Win32 edit control etc.

Delphi is not so popular these days, but there still is a fair share of Delphi programs running.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Component_Library

[2]: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Seattle/en/Vcl.StdC...

> How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives?

Good question. Let's see, what are the GUI programs that I use every day... Emacs, exwm (separate X client so I guess it counts even if elisp), st, chromium, mpv, mupdf, conky. That's 6 out of 7, so I guess the answer is most of them?

(Emacs is built with --without-x-toolkit)

Hmm, I do not consider an Qt app on macOS to be native.

Which is the native GUI toolkit of Linux/UNIX? Athena? Motif? GTK+?

None, unfortunately. You have X11, but nobody uses that anymore.

Yeah, the question was tongue in cheek. Which one do we use then?

I guess the best option is GTK+ because of the number of users?

There are themes that mimic GTK apps on Qt and vice versa and they look like crap.

But in my opinion Qt apps also look like crap on Windows and Mac. They look somewhat like a native app, but everything is off.

For example, if you have a Qt app on Windows and you click a menu separator, the menu closes, <s>like it would do on Mac</s>. On Windows, clicking a menu separator should do nothing, the menu should remain open. There are dozens of little annoyances like that. Not to mention padding/spacing of elements, etc.

Of course, Qt is very useful. I've worked with it (using QWidgets) and I've liked it a lot, despite of its drawbacks. But it's certainly not native. It merely emulates the target interface.

I'm reading this on a Mac; I clicked on the File menu in Safari, then clicked a menu separator, and the menu remained open.

This does not, of course, invalidate your main point in any way. (I also currently have p4v open on another display, and, well.)

They wouldn't raise any cash from this kind of IPO. Your point, however, is valid.

They can keep the resources they waste on my machine if they'd only give me a damned dark mode.

Why? Do you have issues with their current app? I've never noticed any problems that I think it being native would solve really.

> Do you have issues with their current app?

I've got Slack open right now, I'm a member of 2 teams and it's using 1.5 GB of memory across all of its processes.

I'm wondering if you think that's an acceptable memory usage? I don't personally feel that's acceptable for an app that isn't Photoshop, a video production suite or a 3D modelling program.

I'm a member of a third "occasional team", but I don't dare open that because I really don't wish to give more RAM to Slack!

Curious: What OS are you using and what's your total memory usage for Slack and all of its helper processes?

Another problem with the Electron app: there were drive-by trolls in the public Clojure Slack team a couple of weeks ago, because it's possible to open the JS in the Electron app and interfere with user role permissions and notify thousands of users with extremely obscene photo messages all at once.

I'd switch to a proper native app that respects the norms of its host platform in a heartbeat.

The memory usage is just obscene. Maybe it doesn't matter with all the RAM we have, but I hate inefficiencies and looking at slack's resource usage just makes me sad.

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