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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter

Does this seem unreasonably long? I get that large corps have longer development time, but wouldn't this be behind a internal feature toggle anyways? How do they deploy versions really? Did they already ripped out the code and are unable to go back? They need to rewrite the functionality or something like that?

Probably only someone with insight into this specific problem can answer but would be interesting to hear about it...

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Rich text editors are a nightmare to implement, especially on the web, mainly because formatting a substring requires creating a new nested element, so you have to constantly synchronize a flat string with a tree structure. It's possible that they dodged this problem by storing the in-progress message as a tree and just intercepting keyboard events to directly manipulate that. If so, the core data structure would've changed and it might not be a clean swap between two different widgets that both just operate on a string.

That's just a guess though; I don't work at Slack.

Sure, I understand the complexity of implement rich text editors / WYSIWYG. However, when implementing and deploying something like this, you usually put it behind a feature toggle (so, if you have a "text editor" component, you start by extracting old text editor into something like "raw text editor" which "text editor" uses by default. Now you can add "rich text editor" to the "text editor" component, but only if the feature flag is activated) so you can toggle it back/forth as needed.

My point is that abstracting things that way may have carried deceptively significant overhead, and if they intended to move everyone to the new editor without a toggle (which they clearly did), they may just gone forward with deep, incompatible changes instead. So now they'd have to go back and re-structure everything to make it modular in that way so that the two versions can coexist.

> may just gone forward with deep, incompatible changes

Yeah, this would be my assumption as well, which is why this is so unreasonable. Any serious company will deploy changes that are easy to rollback (especially when it comes to UI changes) and that Slack can't do that, speaks a lot about their engineering talent. But then again, they never been famous for their software engineering exactly.

If I had to guess, it might not take two full weeks, they're just releasing it as part of a normal sprint cycle, not as a hotfix.

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