[throwaway66666]

Nobody has the resources for that. Some companies make OSes, and some companies send rockets to space. Those feats are also powered by thin wrappers over electron. /s

People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform. And there are projects far bigger than slack, like ffmpeg and OpenCV that have existed for decades, always had very fast development cycles, with only a subset of the funding and money that Slack has, and stayed native and close to the metal forever.

A better answer would be, that Slack has deemed the benefits that would result from this as not that important. Or that the current team's expertise cannot handle the task. But they always looking into ways of improving the core product and experience.

[johnzim]

Slack also grew out of the team that made Glitch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)

That core team therefore had a lot of frontend web dev experience. It made sense that they'd stick to their strengths

[stephenr]

The performance and resource usage of slack both on the desktop and in a browser indicates that “front end code” is not their strength.

[SkyMarshal]

Creating a web app with a multi-billion dollar valuation indicates it is their strength. Who cares about a little superfluous memory usage compared to that.

[sixstringtheory]

Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment?

Can you see how maybe other people might have valid concerns about the effects of a product, and ask for more rigor in the company's processes?

[SkyMarshal]

>Drilling and refining fossil fuels are BP's strengths, who cares about a little oil spilling into the environment?

That's perhaps the most tortured analogy I've ever heard. I can't even begin to fathom how you think that's comparable or relevant.

[sixstringtheory]

Ah, a popular strawman tactic these days: attack the analogy.

Sounds like it got my point across. You just don’t like the point.

[beatgammit]

Slack didn't win because it was better, it won because businesses thought they were better. That's how most business software works: it creates a problem in the customer's mind in such a way as the customer naturally sees the product as the solution.

Slack is successful because of marketing, not technical superiority.

I worked at a small company that used Google Talk for office chat, and us developers complained because it was difficult to have a group conversation with. We started using Discord (we were familiar with it and liked the dark theme) and it caught on and we were quite productive with it. Our business types saw it and decided to "formalize" it, so they picked Slack and rolled it out company wide. Most people actually preferred Discord, but the business types preferred Slack (probably mostly because of marketing), and now we're all using Slack.

Now, Slack also didn't royally screw up as it scaled up (outages were rare and transparently reported), which is a credit to the developers and PR people. That being said, just because something is successful doesn't mean it's good; it could be, but that's tangential to the topic at hand.

[nameismypw]

Developers who respect their work, for one.

[chocolatkey]

See the other child comment about ripcord. Made by one (smart) person

[somethingnot]

> People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform

OpenGL is dying. It's already deprecated on MacOS.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/opengl-opencl-dep...

[yellowapple]

Apple deprecates lots of things that are still alive and well (see also: headphone jacks). I wouldn't read too much into that.

[Groxx]

Sure, but there are multiple "OpenGL on Metal/Vulkan" projects. Because it's possible to do so without all that much of a performance loss.

OpenGL effectively should die... but it's not going to be in favor of raw Metal/Vulkan, except in rare cases. Most people already use engines that abstract most of that away, and Metal/Vulkan are in basically every way better for those engines.

[bendixso]

It is telling that the person arguing in favor of native C/C++ has to use a throwaway account for fear of going against the dominant force of opinion in our industry. We should be able to have these conversations openly without wondering if it makes us less employable.

[qudat]

Please. This is literally the same argument I read over and over again on HN. This IS the bastion for this kind of argument.

[hellofunk]

You shouldn't make assumptions about why someone's account is named throwaway.

[bendixso]

Fair point. It's a thought that has gone through my head a few times. There are places that want you to conform to whatever it is we call "modern" software development, and I often find myself feeling uncomfortable about expressing an alternate viewpoint.

There's no conspiracy or anything going on here, and you're right it's wrong to assume. That's the general sentiment of what I was trying to say though.