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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

For me the gold standard of Chat applications is always going to be mIRC. It supports a ton of plugins, consumes 10-50mb of memory and little to no CPU. You could be connected to multiple servers and channels with DCC scripts running and you still wouldn't notice that it's even running.

Even though Slack is using react now, they are still using electron under the hood. Which means it can never match the snappiness of a native application like mIRC.

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I don't really understand the hacker love for IRC. It's always been hard to figure out what level of encryption you can expect, what plugins are supported on what clients, using it from multiple devices was never a good experience, you miss any messages sent while your pc was off, very poor support for searching server history for messages with certain text, sending files can be confusing, etc. Having a snappy client is cool but it'd be cooler if it supported half the modern features people enjoy when using chat.

Their comment had nothing to do with IRC. It was comparing two chat clients and how Slack's Electron version is much worse than a native version.

The native client they were referring to was mIRC, which does much less than Slack does. A better comparison might be Discord, which performs much better than Slack and is also written in Electron. VSCode, written in Electron, performs much better for me than Visual Studio (a native app), but I wouldn't use that as proof that Electron is faster than native apps because Visual Studio does so much more

The major differences I can think of off the top of my head are threading, reactions, voice chat, and history. Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC.

Don't forget screen-share and video chat

> Voice chat is the only one that should use significantly more resources than mIRC.

And you, without knowing all the product requirements and technical constraints, know this exactly how?

I'm not really comparing the slack of today with mIRC which was first released in 1995. In early 2000s back when IRC was still very popular, mIRC was a breeze to use on computers which existed. It hasn't seen much development over the past decade and it shows, but it's commendable that lightness was a priority for developers who built it.

It's more than 15 years since I used mIRC and I still romanticize it and haven't found anything I like more to replace it. mIRC scripting was some of the first programming I did.

I also cut my programming teeth on mIRC scripting before later moving onto the web. Text manipulation, event driven arch, UI design with dialog boxes, all made very accessible!

Not mIRC, but I run x-chat and Slack side-by-side on a daily basis. Wholly different experience... I don’t think I’ve ever had to kill x-chat for pegging a CPU and killing my battery :)

> For me the gold standard of Chat applications is always going to be mIRC.

For you ... for me, mIRC is difficult to use, understand, and overall not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as slack.

Not to mention mIRC is missing a ton of features that slack has which specifically makes it better suited for businesses. Push notifications and chat history to name a few.

Yes! This 1000x this! I cut my teeth on mIRC scripting. Frustrating and enjoyable at the same time.

I've since moved to IRSSI and others, but you are correct about memory/CPU usage and functionality.

Every single '$new-thing' like Slack makes the interaction WORSE, instead of improving it. I wish more SV superstars were greybeard hackers.

mirc is windows only? there are many web-based irc these days and they worked well

Can you find me a web-based IRC client which runs in <100MB of memory?

interesting, so I checked out mirc and reported it's windows-only(hope to save someone sometime), and since I used irc over browser so I added some info for that. Still, obviously someone disliked this sort of comments and downvoted, I'm always surprised by downvotes like this sort, any bystander can shed some lights? Am I supposed to always write a cheerful comment for basic neutral truths?

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