[trasz]

Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offset. I guess it's because companies like those don't care about actual reliability - what they do care about is availability.

[snvzz]

Slack comically uses gigabytes of RAM and plenty of CPU time in the client side.

[WJW]

Wtf are you doing with it? My slack instance (on linux) is resting around 300 MB resident set size and 0% cpu. 300 MB is still a lot for a chat app, but it is definitely not gigabytes.

[guelo]

Make sure you're counting all the sub-processes it spawns (at least on Mac, don't know about linux)

[dan-robertson]

If you just add up memory usage for subprocesses you are likely to over count due to shared memory. The number you typically want to add up in Linux is ‘proportional set size’ which is, I think, the sum over every page of the process’s memory of page_size / number of processes which can access the page. I don’t know what happens if you mmap some physical memory twice (I think some newish Java GC does this).

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Obligatory I Am Developer toon: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798/p...

[yakshaving_jgt]

I wonder who he stole that joke from.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I would assume bruised_blood, but I can't [easily] find the original, so I posted that.

[yakshaving_jgt]

No, sure. That’s fair enough.

My point simply being that iamdevloper is a notorious joke thief and is especially unsporting about it when it’s pointed out.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I did not know that. Maybe it would have been better to spend more time trying to find the original comic (I guess maybe an image search. Doomscrolling @bruised_blood is a lost cause).

[EDITED TO ADD] I tried image search. No dice.

[musicale]

It's a nice demonstration of the efficiency of web apps vs. native apps.

[sitkack]

It really has nothing to do with that. The slack client is just written poorly.

[musicale]

> The slack client is just written poorly.

Why yes, Slack does seem to be written poorly - just as poorly as every other web app that I use including VS Code, Discord, MS Teams, etc..

Maybe the Slack developers are just stupid, uneducated, malicious, poorly managed, or ambivalent (or all of the above) but the platform does to be conducive to creating clunky and bloated software.

[KronisLV]

While i agree with your overall point, i think that VS Code is one of the better (only?) examples of really good web technology based software. It's snappy, reliable and has very few bugs.

If you want bad examples of similar software, have a look at Brackets (https://brackets.io/index.html) and Atom (https://atom.io/).

Maybe things have improved in the past years, but last i checked Atom in particular was horrendously slow.

[joshlemer]

How could you say that Slack has poor functionality compared to IRC?

[exfascist]

When you type something into IRC that message shows up in the log and every online users client pretty reliably. Furthermore the high degree of diversity among clients provides a pretty extreme amount of client side functionality that Slack completely lacks (scripting is a huge one.)

[ryukafalz]

The versatility of clients is indeed a huge benefit of IRC. I used to use IRC at work and always had my Weechat window split with a small pane up top showing either my highlights or a channel I needed to monitor at the time. With Slack, you can’t do that, which means you have to repeatedly click between channels if you need to pay attention to multiple at a time.

[diroussel]

You can use split view to keep an eye on another channel. But another window would be better.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/4403608802963-Ope...

[spicybright]

I love irc, but is is just silly.

Slack has much better history because you don't need to have been online when messages are sent to log them. Slack is absolutely more reliable in this regard.

IRC is easy to script because the protocol is so simple. But you leave so much on the table for that cost.

Obviously if your use case is text only that you don't care about being persistent and you lean heavily on scripting to get things done then IRC will do the trick. Otherwise it's such a crutch to do anything besides beyond that.

[zie]

Slack is not instantly "better" than IRC, it's just a different approach to the chat problem and it's arguably more approachable for people that don't want to learn about the chat space.

Logging is just different between the two.

For IRC, logging is outside the scope of the IRC protocol. Anyone can log anything anytime anywhere with whatever policies and procedures they want. This usually leads to each channel/project having some "official" log of the channel somewhere, using whatever they feel is good for them.

Slack on the other hand centralizes the logs, which removes lots of control into the administrators/slack developers.

So Slack's logs are likely easier to find, but that doesn't necessarily make them easier to use.

Persistency is also just different, IRC makes it your problem, but it's a solved problem if you care about it. irccloud.com and sr.ht both offer persistence in different ways as two differing examples to the problem.

Slack of course centralizes the problem and removes some control.

I personally think Slack and approaches like it (I prefer MatterMost) are great for internal things where administrators need central control of stuff for various reasons. For public things, I think Slack is a bad solution, and something like IRC or Matrix is a better solution to the problem of public chat.

[bmn__]

> For IRC, logging is outside the scope of the IRC protocol.

Nope, the community has understood that server-side logging (and making it available to clients who missed stuff happening) is a useful thing. https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory

[zie]

ah, neat! Looks like there are even deployed IRCv3 networks like libera.chat, very cool!

[exfascist]

IRC has logs for history, they're fast and you can run your own logger to control the retention policy if you want. These heavy weight IM tools have extremely short log retention (months) and searching through the logs is extremely slow and frustrating IME.

[trasz]

Not only that, but you can grep IRC logs using whatever Unix tools you want, which is much more powerful than anything Slack has to offer.