I had trouble reading more than the opening volley of the article due to popups. Am a Discord user, and rust application programmer: What GUI framework are they using? EGUI? GPUI? Something custom?
GPUI from comments? I meant to try GPUI, but backed off after an announcement pending its maintenance would be in question (?) a few months ago, and Zed broadly ending up being a false messiah, for my uses. (Not on the tier of JetBrains IDEs, a bug with a long thread they closed which (still I believe?) causes it to open cached versions of files, then clobber edits made since the cache, e.g. by other programs. I.e. the sort of bug which renders software too dangerous to use. I will not switch to a GUI framework from a group that ignores bugs of that severity reported by many people)
anthony-eid 5 minutes ago [-]
Could you link this bug report please? I would love to take a look at it to see if i could fix it
earthnail 5 hours ago [-]
They use GPUI. Says so on X.
" (And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone.) "
sphars 5 hours ago [-]
Which I believe GPUI is the same framework that Zed (the editor)[0] is using
The fact they're using gpui is... Bad. Is someone trying to make it integrate with native accessibility frameworks? If not (and if they force the native app on us) this transition is going to lock out a ton of people who use assistive technologies.
tensor 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, see: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-kit. I've been following these rust UI toolkits and things like accessibility have consistently been missing. This is the first time I've seen a UI library that appears complete enough to build a real product with.
ethin 42 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, that's what worries me. Pretty much every Rust UI library I've seen which isn't wxdragon/Relm/GTK lacks accessibility. And most of them don't even have the primitives for it (given that most of them are abandoned).
the__alchemist 35 minutes ago [-]
This is one angle. I do not see it as a deal breaker in the way you phrase it. I suppose we all have our own. If everyone's had to be satisfied, we'd have no software!
I think in the specific case of Discord, I.e. from a big company, I agree they should handle this properly. As a broader standard, I am not as concerned.
ethin 8 minutes ago [-]
This is a dealbreaker for me even if I didn't want it to be. If your application does not either interact with a11y frameworks (UIA, AT-SPI, NSAccessibility, ...) or does not implement an equivalent that communicates with my screen reader, I literally cannot use your application. I could OCR your application, or use AI and have it use your app for me via screenshots, but neither are even remotely comparable to using the native platform accessibility frameworks.
Forgeties79 27 minutes ago [-]
It’s potentially a dealbreaker for millions of people whether they want it to be or not unfortunately. For them accessibility is not optional or can otherwise be taken as a “wait and see” issue.
anthony-eid 19 minutes ago [-]
gpui does have a11y support for accessibility, Zed just hasn't piped it through yet. I'm also pretty sure Discord is using their own fork of gpui with patches to add any missing functionality they needed
davkan 33 minutes ago [-]
Could maybe use the browser client as a workaround.
lsaferite 3 hours ago [-]
Considering the fact that the gpui code only exists as a crate under the zed repo, I'd say you are correct.
porphyra 1 hours ago [-]
weird how the website doesn't have a single screenshot on it, considering it's for a GRAPHICAL user interface. You'd think the examples page would have some screenshots, but in fact it's just example code snippets with no indication of what the code would render as.
I've built a couple of desktop apps for myself recently using GPUI-kit [0] and it's been fantastic. I'm not a Rust programmer, so leaned heavily on Opus 5.5 for both, but the end result is two apps that are considerably faster than anything I could pay money for, and tailored to exactly what I need.
We've been using Iced for Totem [0], our cross-platform collaborative workspace app. Incidentally we took a similar route to what Discord is aiming to do, layering a rust engine with native UI (e.g. Swift on mobile) and it has been going well so far.
The one major concern I have with this framework, and with rust UI frameworks in general, is accessibility. That's something you get for free or nearly-free in other ecosystems but seems to require a fair bit of elbow grease here.
Still, I would wholeheartedly recommend Iced, with the one caveat that it hasn't yet hit 1.0 and version upgrades could be a little painful, and might bring big changes.
> I had trouble reading more than the opening volley of the article due to popups.
Why do people not use adblockers even this late since their introduction?
hbn 5 hours ago [-]
The Verge is paywalled now but the article really doesn't have much content other than "they're working on a Rust client and someone showed an early build using 290MB of RAM"
kayson 6 hours ago [-]
I'm very interested in (and a total novice in) cross platform GUI application development. Hadn't heard of GPUI, though I had heard of Tauri. I looked at the GPUI front page and saw this mess of almost-CSS method chaining... Surely there's a better way? This seems horrible to me.
IMHO Rust isn't a great language for describing UIs because it is too explicit in places that doesn't need to be for coding a UI.
Which is why in Slint (another Rust UI framework) we opted for a DSL. The application logic stays in Rust, but the UI is described in a language designed for it.
> Rust isn't a great language for describing UIs because it is too explicit in places that doesn't need to be for coding a UI.
That's is not about just Rust ... Any domain has its own optimal or sub-optimal language describing it. Criteria of optimality is a bit subjective of course. Like: INI, TOML, YAML, etc. are better (YMMV, again) for user facing configs than JSON or XML and so on.
I think that HTML is better for defining hierarchical UI structures and CSS and CSS selectors are (arguably again) better to define UI styling.
My Sciter[1] was initially using .FRM alike inputs (VisualBasic forms, good for IDE but bad for a human) but I quickly discovered that having styles, structure and code-behind-UI in single PL makes non-manageable mess. So Sciter uses HTML, CSS and JS we all familiar with. Not 100% match of course but good enough.
I'd like to know it. I don't think that it can be substantially better. You have to compromise between the amount of customization you are allowed to do and the amount of options you have to pick values for.
I can't vouch for GPUI, I don't know how good its compromise is, but it bears enough similarities to other modern UI-toolkits. I don't think there is a better way, but if you know one, I'd like to know about it.
And, well, don't forget, it is a front-page example, that is not necessarily an example how one should compose their code, it demonstrates what you can do with GPUI. In real life code you'd probably move those children's construction into separate named functions, maybe you'd use some predefined styles to apply to individual elements, instead of picking fg/bg/text-colors, maybe sizes and some other attributes for each one explicitly, and maybe some other tricks.
eviks 4 hours ago [-]
One improvement could be a better way to group and elide units, e.g.
Instead of
.border_1().border_color(rgb(0x0000ff))
You get
.border(1 0x0000ff)
(guess, this can only be in a macro)
Or at least have "color" which understands that it's allied to border instead of having to repeat "border"
> I don't think that it can be substantially better
Don't give up too early, there is no way it can't be, we don't really have any good systems optimized for ergonomics to reach anything great
c-smile 14 minutes ago [-]
> .border(1 0x0000ff)
After 10 or so of those you'll start dreaming of
border-left: 2px solid rgb(0 0 100%);
right?
tcallred 3 hours ago [-]
All a language needs to be good at expressing UIs is some sort of tail lambda syntax like Swift and Kotlin. It's the perfect way to express a tree structure (which is essentially all UI) while also being in a true programming language (as opposed to a markup language like XML).
odo1242 2 hours ago [-]
Well, keep in mind that you’re not expected to have the entire UI in one statement. You’re supposed to break this up into functions. That’s why stuff like Flutter and SwiftUI work.
Also, this is basically what Tailwind code looks like.
CupricTea 4 hours ago [-]
This is basically what coding UI in Bevy was like before the `bsn!` macro
kalleboo 4 hours ago [-]
I'm never going to complain about SwiftUI again
ijustlovemath 6 hours ago [-]
That's a result of the borrow checker meeting dev ergonomics. Method chaining/functional style ks extremely common. GPUI is also fairly low level, it lets you do a ton of things!
desolate_muffin 5 hours ago [-]
Someone needs close the loop and make an HTML/CSS to GPUI transpiler
So, Blitz? It's by Dioxus Labs and converts HTML and CSS into native Rust rendering like GPUI.
alexaholic 4 hours ago [-]
One person's mess is another person's Tailwind
Swiffy0 6 hours ago [-]
Not sure what to think of this.
Sure, a Rust implementation will perform better and use less RAM, but it's quite obvious that the transition to Rust will be done almost entirely by AI.
Don't get me wrong, the AI coded Rust version of Discord will most likely work just fine. The thing I'm wondering about is if it's a good idea to rewrite your whole codebase (which I assume is handwritten since Discord predates AI coding) with AI because now there is nobody that knows how it really works - I'm wondering what's the value of having a human-written codebase + the people who wrote it. Just feels like one shouldn't throw that into the trash like it's nothing?
kombookcha 6 hours ago [-]
I'm with you and I think a variety of companies are going to learn this in a highly expensive way over the next few years. Once your shared mental model of how the codebase works is gone it seems practically impossible to get it back. Like what would you even do if you change your mind in 3 years - sit everyone down to meticulously comb through all the AI code until they start to get how it works? Getting back to a similar level of understanding seems like it would take ages and effectively locks you into the new solution in a way that cannot be feasibly reversed.
CamperBob2 1 minutes ago [-]
Once your shared mental model of how the codebase works is gone it seems practically impossible to get it back.
You won't want it back. How much time do you spend surfing through your .obj files today?
stackbutterflow 6 hours ago [-]
How is this different from when you join a company and learn your corner of the codebase? In a sufficiently large enough codebase no one had the whole mental model in their head even before AI. What you did was find and ask that one person who knew enough about some part of the project to answer your questions. Now you can ask a model.
theLiminator 9 minutes ago [-]
I believe institutional knowledge used to work on a ship of Theseus model. It's going to be completely different going forward.
SoftTalker 19 minutes ago [-]
Also Reflections on Trusting Trust taken to a whole new level.
spunker540 3 hours ago [-]
It seems like the value is having something performant. Their choices were 1) stick to a web framework their employees know well 2) a performant native app their employees don’t know as well. And they chose 2.
If a model can tell you anything you’d hope to have a human tell you, what’s the difference? It’s a different point of failure— models can go offline, but employees can also quit anytime too.
petra 6 hours ago [-]
When porting an app this way, don't functions/classes preserve the same functionality ?
j_w 5 hours ago [-]
Well not really? You are going from a webpage (Electron) to a native application via Rust. Say you port a React website to a Rust native application, is anything about that code actually similar?
gjsman-1000 6 hours ago [-]
Here's the critical assumption: Somebody has to know how it works, in order for it to be usable.
That's not actually true. Nobody understands everything about how an airplane works, not even the lead engineers. Nobody understands everything about how a car works, or how medical billing works, or how taxes work, or how traffic flow works, or how a CPU works, or how almost anything works. You just need to understand the broad picture and be able to find the details when necessary.
chneu 6 hours ago [-]
Your post is absolute nonsense. Plenty of people know exactly how everything on a plane or car works, or a CPU. I've worked with tons of people who do.
The fear of deskilling is very valid and is already messing things up.
gjsman-1000 5 hours ago [-]
Your post is absolute nonsense. Even the people you are referring to do not know how everything works. Does your airplane engineer know the exact tensile strength of the tire as it hits the landing strip?
bccdee 1 hours ago [-]
They know the tires are rated for hitting a landing strip under XYZ conditions, they know how to test the tires to ensure they're still confirming to the expectations of that rating, and they're in contact with the trusted organization that's responsible for issuing that rating. Each expert has a comprehensive understanding of their field, and the fields comfortably overlap with no gaps. For any given perspective, there are several people with the complete picture of that perspective.
Contrast this with a vibe-coded "airplane" where nobody actually understands the tires and you're basically operating on a set of assumptions. The tires are not rated and there's no trusted organization. Maybe it works, but you don't actually know. Very different; don't play language games.
nozzlegear 2 hours ago [-]
You're putting forth a ridiculous argument. An airplane engineer doesn't need to know how to create the universe from scratch just to work their way up to maintaining airplanes, but they sure as hell understand how the major systems work, how those systems interact, and how to diagnose problems. They don't just tinker around blindly.
subarctic 25 minutes ago [-]
My understanding was that for every component there's someone somewhere who understands exactly how it works at least in terms of smaller components/abstractions and for each of those, recursively, someone knows how it works
add-sub-mul-div 6 hours ago [-]
We're losing a respect and understanding of how basic competence works.
wolvesechoes 6 hours ago [-]
> Nobody understands everything about how an airplane works, not even the lead engineers. Nobody understands everything about how a car works
Of course people do.
chasd00 5 hours ago [-]
Doubtful. The engine engineer doesn’t know the chemical engineering of modern fuels nor the code in the engine controller.
anthk 2 hours ago [-]
In my country in order to earn a true CS degree you need to learn both Chemistry and EE.
Also check the Homebrew CPU running a custom port of Minix 2 with in-place ported C compilers, linkers and assemblers.
alala-lala-lon 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
This is textbook whataboutism.
stasomatic 50 minutes ago [-]
Who cares? I've never had performance issues with Slack, Discord and the like. It runs fast enough on my MBP. They could make it faster by removing the casino lights and prompts and upsells, and research other ways to monetize. Electron is not the issue with Discord, it's their constant annoying nagging.
literallyroy 24 minutes ago [-]
People playing games trying to squeeze out a few more frames.
mintflow 6 hours ago [-]
I noticed this news and because one of my codex banked reset is expiring soon
I launch codex with astra+ultra on my tauri project because webview sometimes cause blank screen on user device to let it to rewrite the tauri projec to GPUI
It did those stuffs for me
- get rid of the CGO and MINGW toolchain for cross building windows on Linux
- wrote a compatbility layer to communicate the original app backend written using rust
- Achieve not ideal but acceptable UI/UX as the tauri project
- The new build using 24MB memory which is quite good and I do not even bother to check the tauri version
It amazing time to rewrite, though I still can't remember joy of old days that manual coding, but my lower back ask me to just embrace the Agentic coding...
PreciousH 6 hours ago [-]
It's crazy how much RAM electron needs, at my old startup the main product was an electron app, i initially used to run into this issue where AI wouldn't clean up the dev builds it spunned up for e2e testing and each could be over 500MB, it just get's to a point that the cross platform advantage is no longer worth it, i think it was one of the main reasons cursor had to move off electron to rust based builds.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
It is a full browser, not surprising at all, only for those that never coded native applications.
c-hendricks 6 hours ago [-]
Oh if you don't like large build artifacts Tauri might not be something to get excited about.
For reference, my src-tauri/target/ folder is 8.3gb.
deaton 7 minutes ago [-]
Its not Tauri, they're using GPUI
Telaneo 6 hours ago [-]
Holy Jesus of Nazareth. I love it.
I just pray that Vencord will continue to work in some form, if only so I can use whatever font I want. I'm not a fan of many other changes they've made and I've thus had to reverse, but I'm willing to trade away the flexibility of CSS for an app that uses 5 times less RAM. Even better if it doesn't go away at all, but we'll see.
RankingMember 6 hours ago [-]
It's great they're working on improving performance, but as they move towards an IPO I'd be looking hard at getting off their platform altogether. They're already shoehorning ads and all kinds of nonsense into their app- it's only going to get worse after the IPO.
Telaneo 5 hours ago [-]
Network effects keep me on it. I'm waiting for the day it collapses so I can spin up a Teamspeak (or whatever) server again, but it's just too darn convenient for everybody else, so I'm stuck with it unless I want to become even more of a hermit.
Kuyawa 6 hours ago [-]
The app size also went from 10 GB to 10 MB, start time went from 10 secs to 10 ms
Goodbye Electron, we barely knew you
jttnr 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder where the 10GB come from. Quick check on Flatpak shows 240 MB download and 568 MB installed size for the Linux install.
Discord even sends its DPO (data protection officer/privacy team) tickets to outsourced offshore copy & paste template support farms/AI chatbots. I've requested my data numerous times, half of the time the ticket was closed without a response, and the ones that DID get a response were the same copy & paste template telling me my data package is being generated.
All data packages were missing 90% of my account data (bug? size issue with zip files?), no avenue to report this to Discord of course, because the only words their "privacy team" know is... :^)
I was going to paste exactly what they sent me, but it turns out some of my data request tickets have been deleted by them.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
What the fuck. That's amazing. 10GB->10MB can't simply be moving from Electron right?
sgarland 5 hours ago [-]
This has to be hyperbole. I built (with Claude) a P2P LAN voice-only chat app in Rust recently, using native frameworks for each platform (Swift, GTK, Win32), and it weighs in at about 5-6 MB depending on the platform. I have spent an enormous amount of time looking for places to squeeze it further. It has ephemeral channels and password protection, but that’s about it: no text chat, no video, no friends, no blocklists, no concept of servers, etc. I can’t imagine everything else Discord has squeezes into another 5 MB.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Electron is a full Chrome instance, plus whatever else makes up the application.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that only explains about 150MB.
If it were simply the Chrome install that would imply Electron is 9GB+ by itself, which it most certainly is not.
chii 6 hours ago [-]
It's probably left over old instances and updates that werent deleted properly. These apps tend to download the update as an entire bundle, rather than any sort of binary diff and patch.
Therefore, if you have an old install and have gone thru several (many) cycles of updates, the installation directory could be riddled with old versions and update files that make up the bulk of that 10 gig.
hypfer 6 hours ago [-]
It can and it does, because it drops a ton of code for scenarios that do not exist. (Not these numbers, of course, but if you check the comments of that account.. well. Yeah. Some kid)
Electron rose to fame because one could just do everything with it and it was good enough.
Being able to do everything also means that the thing can do everything everywhere all at once, which is many lines of code.
___
The magic of electron was that it was "cheap", however, with code being all AI-generated, that's even cheaper. So now everything will be some slop rust until the point when people realize that there is a cost to be paid after all.
For electron, that has been RAM and performance. For the vibeslop.. well. We shall see.
delta_p_delta_x 6 hours ago [-]
Unironically, with LLMs, everyone should be looking to cut their system resource consumption (memory, disk, network, GPU, I/O traffic in general) and rewrite everything natively. Have a platform-independent business logic layer, and a platform-dependent UI/UX layer. Done. It's not even that hard, and has been done several times over; we quite literally have MVC/MVVM/etc that were invented two decades ago.
Operating systems developers should be looking to profile everything. Benchmarking and profiling used to be horribly time-consuming; nowadays, with agents, this is almost trivial. Then valuable engineer time can be spent looking at actually solving and optimising the workloads, from the kernel, to drivers, to user-mode libraries, to vendored applications.
About a decade ago programming was expensive, and we decided writing everything in JavaScript was OK, and wasted everyone's memory instead of using programmer time to write fast and efficient native applications. This is no longer the case.
hypfer 6 hours ago [-]
> Unironically, with LLMs, everyone should be looking to cut their system resource consumption (memory, disk, network, GPU, I/O traffic in general) and rewrite everything natively.
Depends.
There is a lot of value in man-made software where the man knows exactly what happened where when why.
If you just revibe in rust, you get something that works at this point in time, but this deep architectural knowledge is completely lost and you're at the mercy of Dario not locking down your account for wrongthink.
That can still be fine for smaller tools where the cost of recreating them from scratch is alright, but revibing your core business thingy is likely a horrible idea, which I encourage people to do, as I'd love to have the business opportunity to take over their frustrated customerbase ca 5 years from now.
delta_p_delta_x 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think we should just 're-vibe' it as you put it. Naturally the rewrite should be progressive and thoughtful, backed by test-driven development at all levels, and regression tests every step of the way. To reiterate: writing code used to be a lot more expensive, which justified foisting React, Electron, JS on everyone. No longer the case.
I've mentioned in another comment, but my biggest pet peeve is that AI agent applications (Claude, GPT, etc) are themselves just Electron wrappers over their web pages. What a waste.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
>and you're at the mercy of Dario not locking down your account for wrongthink.
Inference cannot be controlled. The models are already out there. It's too late.
hypfer 6 hours ago [-]
Good luck doing the full-hands-off one-shot revibe stuff this all is referring to with GLM-5.3.
That needs claude-like capabilities.
It also should not be done at all. But that approach needs it.
Using open weights models like GLM-5.3 can also speed up rewriting, but then you're rewriting and not revibing, which is a lot slower.
gear54rus 6 hours ago [-]
you must be joking 10GB haha
who downloads this? there's a website available
saghm 5 hours ago [-]
Push-to-talk does not work well on in the browser at least on Wayland/Linux. The shortcut only gets sent to the active window, which for the type of contexts where push-to-talk is useful (e.g. gaming) is a dealbreaker. I've read stuff indicating that xdotool can manually handle things reasonably enough on X11, but I was never able to get it working reliably for any of the various Wayland replacements for xdotool, so when I've done voice calls, I've had to grudgingly use the desktop client.
I kinda wish we went the other way, and all apps were web apps: easier to modify on the client side, etc.
WhitneyLand 1 hours ago [-]
Notable on the mobile app side that react native is getting tossed out along with electron.
It makes sense and I think they are going to be more teams moving in this direction.
Now that agents are good enough to one shot native UI from a Figma spec, these extra layers will be seen more as adding unnecessary complexity and ram bloat.
happyPersonR 2 hours ago [-]
Most people have ditched discord because if you try to do anything of value discord deletes the server
Scaled 2 hours ago [-]
Community managers must learn to never build a community on someone else's platform.
lukan 1 hours ago [-]
But you do realise your advice is ignored by roughly 99.9% of people who use FB and co. and this is still where the people are?
Also, what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?
Scaled 1 hours ago [-]
Facebook is one of the worst places to build a community. You now have to pay to post more than two links a month, even.
And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)
subarctic 21 minutes ago [-]
If everyone listened to this advice most communities would not be built
The Linux desktop client was using a bit more memory than I expected. 1326 MB from a cold start, and I'm only in 11 servers.
devinhades333 21 minutes ago [-]
SO annoying that pay only subscription only articles continue to rank in the top pages of this.. a paid only or subscription only article that is not accessible to everyone should automatically no be considered for 1st page ranking
Daedren 6 hours ago [-]
I've never used GPUI. Does GPUI provide the same assurances of accessibility? Of proper CJK rendering?
Activities will apparently still use Tauri. Is that going to be a compatibility nightmare due to WebKit? (At least until CEF comes out)
tensor 1 hours ago [-]
Yes it can be made accessible, it's just not in the repo and needs to be integrated with other libraries. Things like https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-kit do it for you.
eviks 4 hours ago [-]
Think still has no accessibility, and given that the public framework is abandoned might not get there
drcongo 3 hours ago [-]
Not quite abandoned, just that the Zed team stopped focussing on it. I've been building with this, very active GPUI framework: https://gpui-kit.com
mintflow 6 hours ago [-]
It render accetpable Chinese text, and the IME stuffs work on the control such as search box
mahboi 3 hours ago [-]
99% of the important parts here are not Rust itself but whatever stack is drawing the UI. This whole article is based on a Twitter post, except it's longer yet still has info missing, so I just went to https://x.com/svishnevskiy/status/2118081920194203799 and the answer is GPUI.
nubinetwork 3 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it'll support arm64, I just found out the current version is amd64 only, despite being electron and also runnable on android.
slashink 2 hours ago [-]
Only true today for Linux. For both Windows and Mac we ship an ARM64 client. With this new Rust version we're also going to ship an ARM64 Linux client.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
GPUI is quite a strange choice because there are so many forks of it, because Zed which made it is not interested in PRs that don't serve their use case of text editors, thus lots of common sense PRs for general desktop development were rejected.
tensor 59 minutes ago [-]
The fragmentation around GPUI really is unfortunate. It seems to be the only framework that is complete enough for serious products. E.g. you can pair it with accesskit and have accessibility, it has a good number of components including difficult to write ones like text editors with highlighting.
lyorig 4 hours ago [-]
Serein[0] recently got on my radar, being exactly that (A Rust Discord client). Been using it for the last few weeks, and boy is it snappy! I rather like this trend of stuff being rewritten in Rust (usually via LLMs). Spotifast[1] being another great example.
Perhaps Discord caught wind that this is now possible, and don’t want to be left behind?
There was already an electron-free native client for discord some years back, but they interfered with it. At this point, there's nothing at all impressive about this. It's not hard to ask AI to "RIIR" as has been shown many times. However, I am glad that building stuff on electron might finally be seen as lazy and wasteful.
krystalgamer 6 hours ago [-]
If I understand correctly, they're ditching Electron but still using React but with their custom renderer.
reinhash 4 hours ago [-]
It's great to see so many big companies making the switch to Rust. It is an amazing language and by now it has proven to be a solid multi-purpose language.
Many engineer consider Rust a systems programming language (and it is!), but it also offers great abstractions to write on a higher level, building API's and Interfaces
asow92 6 hours ago [-]
Asking in good faith: In the agentic age why use abstractions like Electron at all? Shouldn't we write apps in lower-level system languages like Rust like Discord has done?
cloverich 5 hours ago [-]
Consistent UI and control. I re-wrote my electron app in Swift. Its great. But... some of the UI is weird at times; weird patterns; weird behavior. And Apple's UI framework is one of the better ones. Even for AI, each platform will have its own quirks and just _finding_ them takes real users to expose. We take it for granted how flexible and powerful browser UI is, because there's so much baggage and performance related factors. But many UI frameworks are worse, and historically always were.
I think what we're seeing here - and likely to continue to see - is new versions of web UI that eschew a lot of the historical baggage given they don't need to support older websites. And possibly something more powerful. So I guess re-writes or partial ports that take only the parts we need. Presumably a bunch of people will try and hopefully, a few succeed.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
> Consistent UI and control.
Neither of which is actually good for your users. Look like other apps on the platform, FFS.
taschmex 5 hours ago [-]
I am not a developer, but using this type of frameworks and toolkits means that a lot of useful (and sometimes "boring") things are already thought through and taken care of. This is probably most important for smaller projects and teams, but some of it probably applies to Discord scale operations as well :)
While you _should_ put some effort into tuning and fixing these things for your specific project, you will "mostly" get things like cross-platform support for all major desktop operating systems, some support for accessibility-tools like screen readers and voice over, devtools and debuggers, application installers, (push) notifications, caching, some aspects of security and cryptography, log handling, and file handling for free, or at least get a reasonable push in the right direction, with Electron.
The alternative is either getting each of these things from a different third party source, or making them all in-house.
With a popular abstraction layer like Electron + a web stack, you will to some extent encounter the same problems, mysterious log messages, design considerations and other issues as everyone else. This means that you can find documentation, stack overflow questions, new hires, consultants, blogs, LLMs, etc. that have the skills and knowledge you need, instead of researching and solving everything in-house.
philistine 5 hours ago [-]
> [...] using this type of frameworks and toolkits means that a lot of useful (and sometimes "boring") things are already thought through and taken care of.
You're falling in the trap of the cross-platform dream. Electron takes insane decisions about how your app is going to achieve cross-compatibility in the name of allowing web devs to do the work. It is simply the wrong tool for the AI age, since a versatile web dev can turn to an AI to help them achieve the work.
Maybe the good thing to come out of the RAM crisis is that engineers will care about memory usage again lol.
himata4113 6 hours ago [-]
The bad thing here is that modding discord will become significantly harder and might have been their original intention here.
slashink 2 hours ago [-]
Hey, I work at Discord, specifically on this effort. Our entire focus here has been about improving performance and making the client really feel great.
Scaled 2 hours ago [-]
It's difficult to believe Discord's intent is to make the client great when the recent updates have been to shove Best Buy ads into it. Even to the point of surfacing ads as friend dm notifications! In fairness, I'm jaded since I lost my account due to a sudden ultimatum to share my phone number -- extortion for my PII. So it is impossible for me to believe Discord operates in good faith.
Insanity 2 hours ago [-]
In fairness these are probably distinct teams at discord. A team of engineers focused on performance probably _genuinely_ cares about that.
But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.
Scaled 1 hours ago [-]
This is a fair point, but it's basically being proud of making the monstrous privacy-destroying ad machine go 10% faster. With how they pressure people to doxx themselves to them (phone number verification) or be completely locked out of their accounts, there is enough predatory tactics in that company that no one should feel proud of working there.
slashink 28 minutes ago [-]
Yeah look Discord is more than one person. A lot of us really care about making the most performant client and that's why we did this.
positron26 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
unrented7977 1 hours ago [-]
You're saying this to a random person who doesn't like the software you use. How absolutely puerile. Please either grow up or stop commenting.
Scaled 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks, but I already left hell (Discord) for heaven (open, self-hostable platforms).
himata4113 5 minutes ago [-]
Please drop a stripped .pdb right next to the binary or at least make it downloadable :)!
1 hours ago [-]
4yeyeyeyey 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cfbradford 6 hours ago [-]
They’re showing how easy it is to vibe code a port of the app. A motivated developer outside Discord could do the same and release OpenDiscord or whatever if they cared enough to want to mod the app that way.
hmry 3 hours ago [-]
Discord says using modified or alternative clients is against their terms of service, and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)
They're not exactly friendly to that sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they add some traps to catch people making their own client.
So I'd +1 the sibling comment's suggestion to consider alternatives to Discord, if you're setting up your own community
writtenone 1 hours ago [-]
So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.
10111001 41 minutes ago [-]
> So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.
How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...
> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)
...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.
sellmesoap 3 hours ago [-]
Since discord announced that they would be scanning ID a lot of alternatives have sprung up, chatto and Armada are both looking promising as alternatives, plus the chatto vibed marketing materials on their Dev chat gave me a laugh the other week!
Scaled 2 hours ago [-]
I can recommend both Matrix and Discourse forum as excellent open source selfhostable alternatives.
sellmesoap 11 minutes ago [-]
I like matrix, its like the new IRC for almost real time developer chat, I also do this via Discord but I'd prefer an open alternative. If you have experience running a matrix server do you find the data storage an issue? It sounded like if you federate and join the bigger channels you can balloon your storage pretty fast.
uproarchat 5 hours ago [-]
Ahem there is also the option to check out competitors ;)
There are literally dozens of open-source Discord clients already, both vibe-coded and not; and have been for many years. Nobody needed to prove this was possible, least of all Discord.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
This is the way, LLMs are an enabler and force multiplier to help you build whatever interface you want on whatever protocol you have to reverse engineer.
Provide it the official client and point it at public api endpoints (or an LLM operated mitm proxy), set it to work to reimplement.
ChocolateGod 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see any reason to think the web client is going away.
rbits 6 hours ago [-]
They can just repackage the web app and mod that if all else fails.
muddi900 6 hours ago [-]
Some vibekiddie will reengineer this, and mod it.
rs999gti 5 hours ago [-]
How? Anthropic hard coded anti-reverse engineering instructions into Claude.
Local AI for starters, stop relying on a single timesharing AI vendor.
inknight 1 hours ago [-]
DeepSeek + DSH can do it with a fraction of the cost
swat535 51 minutes ago [-]
As well as literally any other Chinese / open model.
I'm not surprised Anthropic and OpenAI are trying their best to ban / severely handicap competition and crack down on opensource. It's a major threat to their existence.
techjamie 4 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they don't stop it from doing malware analysis. I've been using it to report malware C2s and it's a godsend for pulling apart the layers of crap they use.
Edit: A couple queries with it indicate it will still assist with malware analysis and considers it beneficial. Hopefully it stays that way.
esseph 5 hours ago [-]
Open models have no guardrails.
TheGoddessInari 4 hours ago [-]
This isn't universally true, and there's a lot of pressure to bake guardrails and moderation in: Mistral for instance went from one of the most unhinged to incredibly restrictive models with Mistral 4 Large release.
Several others have done similar to greater or lesser degrees in calendar 2026, but the pressure is there across the board to limit what the open models can do without modifications that could largely only be found locally and not from online providers.
breakwaterlabs 4 hours ago [-]
It may shock you to hear that there are other coding agents than Claude.
abirch 3 hours ago [-]
Wait until they find out about Abliteration models
pyreko 5 hours ago [-]
...so just don't use Claude?
rs999gti 5 hours ago [-]
I thought Claude was the tool for the AI script kiddies?
sunaookami 43 minutes ago [-]
They did not. Everyone has misinterpreted what Anthropic actually did and say. This attention economy is exhausting...
This is what an Anthropic dev said:
>"to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game"
This just means exact clones, not reverse-engineering. The article is blatantly lying. And easy to disprove by... trying it yourself.
not_a9 4 hours ago [-]
Can’t see it on my end, the clanker still finesses IDAPython just fine.
odo1242 2 hours ago [-]
Anti video-game-reverse-engineering, to be specific. It’ll refuse to decompile or reverse engineer any video game.
TremendousJudge 6 hours ago [-]
>vibekiddie
love this term, knew instantly what it means
himata4113 6 hours ago [-]
depends if they decide to use any kind of obfuscation here to protect "IP"
odo1242 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, why would you want to mod the desktop client of discord instead of the web client?
ecshafer 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bakugo 6 hours ago [-]
Mod as in modification, not moderation.
alala-lala-lon 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
chasd00 5 hours ago [-]
The good thing is AI enabling web developers to write native apps.
jarjoura 2 hours ago [-]
Most electron projects exist because engineering organizations couldn't afford to hire platform specialists for every platform they want to run on.
andix 2 hours ago [-]
Also most native UI frameworks don't provide the primitives for modern UI. It's mostly just standard UI elements, sometimes with the possibility to theme them.
But most frameworks don't come even close to CSS and all the possibilities to create custom controls. It often requires to build everything from scratch in code, which is really hard for more complex layouts.
nottorp 1 hours ago [-]
One could reply that it's a feature, since native UIs are more uniform and with less surprises you can concentrate on whatever the fuck you're doing instead of wondering what this app's designer was smoking.
HoldOnAMinute 2 hours ago [-]
There were cross-platform C/C++ libraries in the late 80's to early 90's like Visix Galaxy. However, it was not free - far from it.
We developed on Windows NT and deployed onto HP/UX and Solaris.
nottorp 1 hours ago [-]
Uh Qt is still around. Licensing might be as bad as this Visix Galaxy though these days.
tcfhgj 2 hours ago [-]
certainly not valid for the most used electron projects
5 hours ago [-]
tmpz22 5 hours ago [-]
Is the average web developer benefitting from vibing languages they are not at all fluent with?
A bit like a translator who doesnt speak the language but has Google translate and a few beers in them right?
For example, is there still a massive .clone() problem in LLM generated Rust?
cloverich 5 hours ago [-]
I re-wrote one of my apps in Swift. I don't know Swift. It's been fun. When it gets stuck I look at the code; I have it teach me via analogy to the e.g. mobx/react concepts I do know. In some cases I've improved the LLMs code after learning how something works. In others I work it more like an informed PM - ok the sidebar opening is slow but... its about 10x faster in my electron version. How is the sidebar "mounted" or rendered? I dump tricks I know from web dev and ask how analogues; sometimes that breaks its anti-patterns. Other times I throw constraints I don't know much about - "This is a native version, can we aim to make it 3x faster to start-up? How".
Personally I was surprised how quickly I surpassed my original code, feature wise. Will it stand the test of time? Too early to tell - need to see if I'm still using the native version of the app in a year. But its been more fun and informative - and fast - than I'd expected.
arecsu 5 hours ago [-]
This is the way. I don't know why it's hard for other people to figure out this process.
tmpz22 3 hours ago [-]
Right fun is great but I'm speaking from a professional context. Examples should be production code at legitimate businesses.
For what it's worth I wholly agree with your point and that mirrors the personal project I have. But making personal projects a bit more fun and fluent is not the $10T proposition being championed at the professional level.
mahboi 3 hours ago [-]
Web devs already barely understood their tools. CSS was the closest thing to vibecoding before AI could write code.
nozzlegear 2 hours ago [-]
You're painting with a very wide brush.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, they were always able to. They just were too lazy to do it and didn't care about doing a good job enough to overcome that laziness.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
You know what they meant. This is the same argument that artists used when AI image generation came out, it's not very helpful. Being able to do something and actually doing it are different and we all benefit when web app makers rewrite their apps into native languages.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Some of us are long enough in the business, to know that having Web development skills doesn't preclude having native development skills.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe that was true in the past but it has definitely not been the case for the past 15 or 20 years for web developers who actually don't know anything about native development.
HoldOnAMinute 2 hours ago [-]
Your use of "lazy" here really comes off as "ableist".
"I can do it, and you didn't do it, therefore you must be lazy, because I certainly am not lazy"
What's lazy is not diving into the reasons that people may or may not do things.
bccdee 2 hours ago [-]
So, you're saying that the person you're responding to is really saying, "Developers are too disabled to write native applications"? No, that's nonsense. "Laziness" is not the reason for Electron applications, but neither does it implicate disability in this context.
Incidentally, I think it's kind of ableist to toss around the concept of ableism this lightly. Disability is a set of concrete barriers which go unacknowledged and a set of real accommodations which go unimplemented. Disability activism entails acknowledging those barriers and implementing those accommodations; it does not entail the idea that everyone is always trying their best and nobody is ever negligent.
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
Create a problem (RAM shortage), sell a solution (AI tools to migrate). Awesome
leofree 5 hours ago [-]
About time, I'm tired of fighting. Free the RAM!
cloverich 5 hours ago [-]
Also even without the RAM crisis, the main limitations (time) to optimizing software are gone. If you want to do something impactful, but don't have any good ideas: Take an existing website or application and build an optimized version of it. If you aren't sure where to start, build an isolated workflow out of an existing app or site you like, have the LLM benchmark it, then ask it to make it use 10x less ram / run 10x faster. Ask about what tools it can use to measure, what benchmarks it can come up with to repeatedly test it, how it can automate workflows in a measurable way. Then turn those into tools or specs you can share along with your work.
mahboi 3 hours ago [-]
With PCs, it was never about having a lot of RAM, it was about not having less RAM than others. So it's fine if everyone gets less RAM.
HoldOnAMinute 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds kind of socialist :-)
"No one gets TWO sticks of RAM until everyone has at least ONE stick of RAM!"
sharts 3 hours ago [-]
They’ll never give up bloated javascript frontends and call you poor for wanting anything else while sipping on their overpriced lattes.
anthk 5 hours ago [-]
I always cared with ZRAM under GNU/Linux (I own an n270 netbook with 1GB of RAM and a NUC with 8GB but a Pentium Silver CPU, nothing fancy). Thus, Waterfox with their new Rust based ad blocking engine was a beast, even more with WebGPU enabled and NoScript, just enabling JS for the essential, if any. On top of that, the tab suspending extension. As I program in Rust I need every bit of RAM, even if I disable most debugging options at ~/.config/cargo.toml and I set the build jobs to 1 with "-j1 ".
On the netbook, well.. CWM, UXterm, Dillo, CLI/TUI mail, usenet, IRC and so on clients, groff, nsxiv, mpv, MuPDF... it runs snappier than the NUC for what it does. Programming? Golang for networking stuff -security, not like Rust, but far better than C-, simple C99 for small software, or S9/JimTCL.
Otter Browser for emergencies (JS pages from public institutions/govts in my country).
dirtbagskier 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stefanos82 1 hours ago [-]
Full circle! Back to native code and use libraries like Qt, Dear ImGUI, and so forth LOL!
AlbinoDrought 5 hours ago [-]
With the browser sandbox gone, it will be a good test of faith. Here's to an RCE-free port
1nxpired 1 hours ago [-]
Still a bit high for a messaging app.
vallode 1 hours ago [-]
At this stage I think it is safe to say that Discord is no longer "a messaging" app, since it is basically a social media platform in its own right.
Jonovono 5 hours ago [-]
GPUI is pretty great. I whipped this up the other week and now I no longer need to open VSCode: https://diffy.run
wackget 5 hours ago [-]
How come it's presented as paid software when the binaries are available on GitHub?
Also naming your company "__slop" is a bold move!
Jonovono 5 hours ago [-]
It's open source! Just if you want to pay for it, i'd like to continue working on it and throwing tokens at it but I don't really expect to make much from it. Theres links to the download page at the bottom too: https://diffy.run/downloads/
Thanks haha hitslop, it means "a property used to increase the interactive touch area of a component beyond its visible layout boundaries", which I thought was so funny when I came across it. Owned the domain since 2020, knew it would come in handy eventually!
yigalirani 3 hours ago [-]
an aternative approach is to use using DOM Virtualization. that can save a lot of ram. i wonder if they tried that before the rewrite
wpm 5 hours ago [-]
Someone should do this for Slack
pipe01 6 hours ago [-]
RIP mods
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Somehow we were able to do mods with native applications back in the last century of desktop computing.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
It doesn't say but it's likely a direct product of AI.
WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago [-]
300mb still is a lot
odo1242 2 hours ago [-]
Well, Discord is a pretty complex app. It’s loading/caching images, subscribing to many chats at once, needs to be able to hop into a call at any time, and also renders (most) arbitrary Markdown.
anthk 1 hours ago [-]
Kopete did that under 100MB 15-20 years ago.
resters 6 hours ago [-]
discord's electron app was a study in bloatware, quite unlike nearly all other electron apps I've used.
musha68k 6 hours ago [-]
Potentially even more lightweight: ditch Discord altogether.
Maybe we should collectively use more of our personal tokens to re/write, extend and mix up the common(s) stacks at this point?
hobo_mark 5 hours ago [-]
RIP ripcord.
dist-epoch 6 hours ago [-]
As the motto says, "you can just do things"
Such a rewrite would have been unthinkable 2 years ago, but now it's table stakes.
xmichael909 5 hours ago [-]
more for sam altman!
Varelion 1 hours ago [-]
About fucking time.
7 hours ago [-]
paxy 6 hours ago [-]
We are at a point where the "port this to rust, make no mistakes" meme is basically a reality.
pseudony 48 minutes ago [-]
I don't know about that.
I am porting my Rust slop to Go and Zig simultaneously right now and the LLM is finding bugs in the Rust code as it is generating the Go and Zig code.
But.. maybe, maybe this is the opposite of google translate in the 00's - maybe, if you keep porting back and forth, you will eventually arrive at perfection :P
jmyeet 5 hours ago [-]
We've barely begun seeing the impact of AI on software (IMHO). Things like vibecoding the Adobe suite are going to destroy Adobe. That's going to happen to other companies too. It'll take awhile but it will happen.
I've always disliked Electron apps in principle. The idea was you could write once, run anywhere, which is something we've heard before so many times but it never really works out that way. Back in the early days of Java we heard this mantra with applets and Java desktop apps and the reality was "write once, test everywhere".
The cost is simply too high. Nobody wants an entire browser engine packaged to run a desktop app. Security-wise, this is a nightmare. It's such a huge attack surface (eg [1]). And resource-wise it's also a nightmare. Honestly, Electron apps can't die fast enough for my liking.
What I think we'll see is a return to desktop apps because the cost of porting them to new platforms is dropping like a rock.
There are modding issues with Discord's migration but I believe modding itself is going to be an issue in a world where it's going to be increasingly easy to find and use exploits.
I also wonder if Discord is the best we can do here. I've always hated Discord from a UI/UX perspective. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMHO). There are like 3 different settings buttons. You join a Discord and you get yet another custom flow of having to go to this channel and select roles and do something before you can do something else blah blah blah. Everything feels shoe horned. And Discord channels are a worse repository for information than the old forums were.
What?? As much as I despise Discord this is a positive trend, hope other companies follow suit. Javascript on desktop is a plague on computing and the sooner it dies, the better.
15 years reading the verge without subscription. What happened?
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
You have not been paying attention the last two years, as they decided to go subscription instead of loaded with ads like anything nowadays owned by Future, like Toms Hardware, Anything Central.
hypfer 6 hours ago [-]
You've read them without a subscription for 15 years, but they had 15 years of salaries, server cost, etc. That is what happened
insane_dreamer 56 minutes ago [-]
paywall is better than ads
1209387114555 5 hours ago [-]
I assure you that you haven't missed anything:
> It’s not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”
soon™
And yeah, The Verge was one of my favorite resources earlier too but I've stopped visiting it due to subscription requirement on most articles.
anocna 5 hours ago [-]
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arbor-group 5 hours ago [-]
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acdev_app 5 hours ago [-]
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acdev_app 5 hours ago [-]
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thrwaway73637 4 hours ago [-]
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hendrikmans 5 hours ago [-]
Electron being bad is a bit of a junior- to mid-level engineer tell in my eyes, the sort of thing you'd say if you've just learned that some apps use more RAM than others, maybe built a small Rust TUI and are now wondering why not everything is using Rust. Something you'd believe just before you learn what engineering trade-offs are.
So, yeah, enjoy rebuilding complete browsers, I guess? I'm sure they'll run more efficiently than the rendering engines that have been refined and tweaked over the course of now multiple decades.
Well, unless you leave out the annoying stuff, like a11y, IME, RTL, but who needs those things anyway, am I right.
Then you find out that iterating on a fully Rust-based app is sloooow, so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Congratulations. You've built a browser, just with fewer features, more bugs, and probably higher RAM usage. Good job.
vmg12 5 hours ago [-]
Electron is bad, just because Rust is not a good language for building UIs doesn't make electron not bad. People that pick electron (and Rust / gpui) just completely ignore the entire host of other options that are available (I suspect because they want to avoid thinking).
hendrikmans 5 hours ago [-]
Give me some examples, including their cross-platform story (including mobile).
ogoffart 4 hours ago [-]
I'm working on Slint. It is a declarative UI language that compiles to native code, the application logic can be written in Rust, C++, TS or Python, and it is cross platform, including mobile. Has accessibility through AccessKit. A live preview, so iterating on the UI doesn't mean recompiling Rust.
Compared to Electron, there is no browser, so binaries are a much smaller, use less memory, startup is fast. And the attack surface is also much smaller (no XSS)
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
Cross platform is not an actual achievable goal if you wish to have a pleasant UX. One size does not, in fact, fit all.
the__alchemist 1 hours ago [-]
Could you please explain why? In the context of a PC application. What OS-specific features do you think should be included (keyboard shortcuts?) that can't be copmile-time feature-gated by OS? I would guess the vast majority of functionality is not OS-specific, between Windows, Linux, and Mac.
delta_p_delta_x 5 hours ago [-]
> is a bit of a junior- to mid-level engineer tell in my eyes
There is absolutely no reason for Discord—a chat application—to run everything a browser does. Why do I need to play videos in the chat application? Why do individual avatars and even tags have to run custom shaders? It's called scope creep.
> a11y, IME, RTL
All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago. Comes with entire language packs.
> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript
See above: scope creep; features for features' sake.
gobdovan 4 hours ago [-]
> There is absolutely no reason for Discord—a chat application—to run everything a browser does
Chat apps are literally the central example of why Electron is a God-sent. Here's a video from a Rust guy explaining why there are quite a bit of reasons to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws .
cstdr 13 minutes ago [-]
You don't need a full browser-engine just to render some text with images. The majority of the web api sprawl browsers implement is just baggage for that.
sophacles 3 hours ago [-]
I remember thinking that about "why do i need to display images inline?", back when that idea was pretty novel.
Now i consider that a must have.
Similar for emojis...
It turns out a chat app is about human interaction, not exchanging text, and in human interaction context is a big deal. All these things add context to the chat environment.
Fortunately IRC still works, and you can go enjoy your text only environment if you want!
hendrikmans 5 hours ago [-]
> Why do I need to play videos in the chat application?
You know exactly that the moment that Discord launches a new version that no longer plays videos, people will whine about it.
> All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago.
Yeah, but they're porting to Rust and GPUI and not that.
post-it 5 hours ago [-]
> Then you find out that iterating on a fully Rust-based app is sloooow
Maybe not anymore. I don't work on any Chrome-sized Rust codebases so I don't know, but iterating on anything is so much faster that it might work out fine.
sgarland 5 hours ago [-]
Eh, it’s still pretty annoying. I have a small voice chat app, and it easily takes a couple of minutes to build releases for all three platforms (MacOS, Linux, Windows) on a MBP.
the__alchemist 5 hours ago [-]
Could you please link to some GUI applications you've built in rust, and/or describe why you added those abstractions and built a browser? This doesn't match my experience.
hendrikmans 5 hours ago [-]
I don't understand this question. GPUI's unstable to non-existing a11y, IME, RTL etc. support is well documented.
the__alchemist 4 hours ago [-]
What you posted doesn't match my experience, so I curious how you arrived at the conclusion that building a GUI application is like building a web browser, and why the abstraction layers you described are necessary as a baseline. I am asking you to post links to the rust GUI applications you've built where you ran into this.
hendrikmans 4 hours ago [-]
But that's not what I wrote at all?
easywood 4 hours ago [-]
It is perfectly possible to write an application and not need any web technology whatsoever. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable rewrite. Unless you think calc.exe should also be rewritten for Electron, to avoid creating a new browser in the long run.
hendrikmans 4 hours ago [-]
You are comparing Discord to calc.exe. This is not a serious argument.
spunker540 3 hours ago [-]
You are stating that any move away from electron is a junior engineer decision—also not serious imo.
hendrikmans 3 hours ago [-]
Sir, this is a W-- a thread about Discord moving from Electron to Rust/GPUI. Why are you reframing the discussion like this?
eviks 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm sure they'll run more efficiently than the rendering engines that have been refined and tweaked over the course of now multiple decades.
What top-level engineering experience led you to believe the magic of multiple decades guaranteeing improvements?
hendrikmans 4 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming that browsers, their renderers, V8 etc. are slow and unoptimized?
anthk 1 hours ago [-]
> a11y, IME, RTL
Artcraft it's doing that in every software application;
> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Every Arftcraft software can be command line driven and it's still fast and small compared to your bloated crap.
elevaet 6 hours ago [-]
Hopefully we will get an Electron-free VSCode too at some point.
If all products ditch Electron, it satisfies the NSA requirements of having AI-generated backdoors on your computer, while allowing you to reduce your RAM consumption and letting this precious silicon for Sam Altman (He's quoted saying RAM is better spent in data centers than in personal computers - and in an era where everything is Cloud, one might wonder why the base Macbook Pro has 32GB).
Rendered at 20:18:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
GPUI from comments? I meant to try GPUI, but backed off after an announcement pending its maintenance would be in question (?) a few months ago, and Zed broadly ending up being a false messiah, for my uses. (Not on the tier of JetBrains IDEs, a bug with a long thread they closed which (still I believe?) causes it to open cached versions of files, then clobber edits made since the cache, e.g. by other programs. I.e. the sort of bug which renders software too dangerous to use. I will not switch to a GUI framework from a group that ignores bugs of that severity reported by many people)
" (And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone.) "
[0]: http://zed.dev/
I think in the specific case of Discord, I.e. from a big company, I agree they should handle this properly. As a broader standard, I am not as concerned.
[1] https://gpui.rs/
[2] https://gpui.rs/examples/
[0] https://gpui-kit.com
The one major concern I have with this framework, and with rust UI frameworks in general, is accessibility. That's something you get for free or nearly-free in other ecosystems but seems to require a fair bit of elbow grease here.
Still, I would wholeheartedly recommend Iced, with the one caveat that it hasn't yet hit 1.0 and version upgrades could be a little painful, and might bring big changes.
[0] https://thinktotem.com
Why do people not use adblockers even this late since their introduction?
> div() .flex() .flex_col() .gap_3() .bg(rgb(0x505050)) .size(px(500.0)) .justify_center() .items_center() .shadow_lg() .border_1() .border_color(rgb(0x0000ff)) .text_xl() .text_color(rgb(0xffffff)) .child(format!("Hello, {}!", &self.text)) .child( div() .flex() .gap_2() .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::red())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::green())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::blue())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::yellow())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::black())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::white())), )
Your example would look like this:
More on why we chose a DSL vs code in Rust: https://slint.dev/blog/domain-specific-language-vs-imperativ...That's is not about just Rust ... Any domain has its own optimal or sub-optimal language describing it. Criteria of optimality is a bit subjective of course. Like: INI, TOML, YAML, etc. are better (YMMV, again) for user facing configs than JSON or XML and so on.
I think that HTML is better for defining hierarchical UI structures and CSS and CSS selectors are (arguably again) better to define UI styling.
My Sciter[1] was initially using .FRM alike inputs (VisualBasic forms, good for IDE but bad for a human) but I quickly discovered that having styles, structure and code-behind-UI in single PL makes non-manageable mess. So Sciter uses HTML, CSS and JS we all familiar with. Not 100% match of course but good enough.
[1] https://sciter.com
I'd like to know it. I don't think that it can be substantially better. You have to compromise between the amount of customization you are allowed to do and the amount of options you have to pick values for.
I can't vouch for GPUI, I don't know how good its compromise is, but it bears enough similarities to other modern UI-toolkits. I don't think there is a better way, but if you know one, I'd like to know about it.
And, well, don't forget, it is a front-page example, that is not necessarily an example how one should compose their code, it demonstrates what you can do with GPUI. In real life code you'd probably move those children's construction into separate named functions, maybe you'd use some predefined styles to apply to individual elements, instead of picking fg/bg/text-colors, maybe sizes and some other attributes for each one explicitly, and maybe some other tricks.
Instead of
.border_1().border_color(rgb(0x0000ff))
You get
.border(1 0x0000ff)
(guess, this can only be in a macro)
Or at least have "color" which understands that it's allied to border instead of having to repeat "border"
> I don't think that it can be substantially better
Don't give up too early, there is no way it can't be, we don't really have any good systems optimized for ergonomics to reach anything great
After 10 or so of those you'll start dreaming of
right?Also, this is basically what Tailwind code looks like.
Sure, a Rust implementation will perform better and use less RAM, but it's quite obvious that the transition to Rust will be done almost entirely by AI.
Don't get me wrong, the AI coded Rust version of Discord will most likely work just fine. The thing I'm wondering about is if it's a good idea to rewrite your whole codebase (which I assume is handwritten since Discord predates AI coding) with AI because now there is nobody that knows how it really works - I'm wondering what's the value of having a human-written codebase + the people who wrote it. Just feels like one shouldn't throw that into the trash like it's nothing?
You won't want it back. How much time do you spend surfing through your .obj files today?
If a model can tell you anything you’d hope to have a human tell you, what’s the difference? It’s a different point of failure— models can go offline, but employees can also quit anytime too.
That's not actually true. Nobody understands everything about how an airplane works, not even the lead engineers. Nobody understands everything about how a car works, or how medical billing works, or how taxes work, or how traffic flow works, or how a CPU works, or how almost anything works. You just need to understand the broad picture and be able to find the details when necessary.
The fear of deskilling is very valid and is already messing things up.
Contrast this with a vibe-coded "airplane" where nobody actually understands the tires and you're basically operating on a set of assumptions. The tires are not rated and there's no trusted organization. Maybe it works, but you don't actually know. Very different; don't play language games.
Of course people do.
Also check the Homebrew CPU running a custom port of Minix 2 with in-place ported C compilers, linkers and assemblers.
I launch codex with astra+ultra on my tauri project because webview sometimes cause blank screen on user device to let it to rewrite the tauri projec to GPUI
It did those stuffs for me
- get rid of the CGO and MINGW toolchain for cross building windows on Linux
- wrote a compatbility layer to communicate the original app backend written using rust
- Achieve not ideal but acceptable UI/UX as the tauri project
- The new build using 24MB memory which is quite good and I do not even bother to check the tauri version
It amazing time to rewrite, though I still can't remember joy of old days that manual coding, but my lower back ask me to just embrace the Agentic coding...
For reference, my src-tauri/target/ folder is 8.3gb.
I just pray that Vencord will continue to work in some form, if only so I can use whatever font I want. I'm not a fan of many other changes they've made and I've thus had to reverse, but I'm willing to trade away the flexibility of CSS for an app that uses 5 times less RAM. Even better if it doesn't go away at all, but we'll see.
Goodbye Electron, we barely knew you
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.discordapp.Discord
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982
All data packages were missing 90% of my account data (bug? size issue with zip files?), no avenue to report this to Discord of course, because the only words their "privacy team" know is... :^)
I was going to paste exactly what they sent me, but it turns out some of my data request tickets have been deleted by them.
If it were simply the Chrome install that would imply Electron is 9GB+ by itself, which it most certainly is not.
Therefore, if you have an old install and have gone thru several (many) cycles of updates, the installation directory could be riddled with old versions and update files that make up the bulk of that 10 gig.
Electron rose to fame because one could just do everything with it and it was good enough.
Being able to do everything also means that the thing can do everything everywhere all at once, which is many lines of code.
___
The magic of electron was that it was "cheap", however, with code being all AI-generated, that's even cheaper. So now everything will be some slop rust until the point when people realize that there is a cost to be paid after all.
For electron, that has been RAM and performance. For the vibeslop.. well. We shall see.
Operating systems developers should be looking to profile everything. Benchmarking and profiling used to be horribly time-consuming; nowadays, with agents, this is almost trivial. Then valuable engineer time can be spent looking at actually solving and optimising the workloads, from the kernel, to drivers, to user-mode libraries, to vendored applications.
About a decade ago programming was expensive, and we decided writing everything in JavaScript was OK, and wasted everyone's memory instead of using programmer time to write fast and efficient native applications. This is no longer the case.
Depends.
There is a lot of value in man-made software where the man knows exactly what happened where when why.
If you just revibe in rust, you get something that works at this point in time, but this deep architectural knowledge is completely lost and you're at the mercy of Dario not locking down your account for wrongthink.
That can still be fine for smaller tools where the cost of recreating them from scratch is alright, but revibing your core business thingy is likely a horrible idea, which I encourage people to do, as I'd love to have the business opportunity to take over their frustrated customerbase ca 5 years from now.
I've mentioned in another comment, but my biggest pet peeve is that AI agent applications (Claude, GPT, etc) are themselves just Electron wrappers over their web pages. What a waste.
Inference cannot be controlled. The models are already out there. It's too late.
That needs claude-like capabilities.
It also should not be done at all. But that approach needs it.
Using open weights models like GLM-5.3 can also speed up rewriting, but then you're rewriting and not revibing, which is a lot slower.
who downloads this? there's a website available
It makes sense and I think they are going to be more teams moving in this direction.
Now that agents are good enough to one shot native UI from a Figma spec, these extra layers will be seen more as adding unnecessary complexity and ram bloat.
Also, what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?
And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)
Activities will apparently still use Tauri. Is that going to be a compatibility nightmare due to WebKit? (At least until CEF comes out)
Perhaps Discord caught wind that this is now possible, and don’t want to be left behind?
[0]: https://github.com/ViceVerse-cz/Serein
[1]: https://github.com/crmne/spotifast
I think what we're seeing here - and likely to continue to see - is new versions of web UI that eschew a lot of the historical baggage given they don't need to support older websites. And possibly something more powerful. So I guess re-writes or partial ports that take only the parts we need. Presumably a bunch of people will try and hopefully, a few succeed.
Neither of which is actually good for your users. Look like other apps on the platform, FFS.
While you _should_ put some effort into tuning and fixing these things for your specific project, you will "mostly" get things like cross-platform support for all major desktop operating systems, some support for accessibility-tools like screen readers and voice over, devtools and debuggers, application installers, (push) notifications, caching, some aspects of security and cryptography, log handling, and file handling for free, or at least get a reasonable push in the right direction, with Electron.
The alternative is either getting each of these things from a different third party source, or making them all in-house. With a popular abstraction layer like Electron + a web stack, you will to some extent encounter the same problems, mysterious log messages, design considerations and other issues as everyone else. This means that you can find documentation, stack overflow questions, new hires, consultants, blogs, LLMs, etc. that have the skills and knowledge you need, instead of researching and solving everything in-house.
You're falling in the trap of the cross-platform dream. Electron takes insane decisions about how your app is going to achieve cross-compatibility in the name of allowing web devs to do the work. It is simply the wrong tool for the AI age, since a versatile web dev can turn to an AI to help them achieve the work.
https://nitter.click/svishnevskiy/status/2118081920194203799
But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.
They're not exactly friendly to that sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they add some traps to catch people making their own client.
So I'd +1 the sibling comment's suggestion to consider alternatives to Discord, if you're setting up your own community
How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...
> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)
...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.
FLOSS, easy to self host, and works nicely.
Provide it the official client and point it at public api endpoints (or an LLM operated mitm proxy), set it to work to reimplement.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
I'm not surprised Anthropic and OpenAI are trying their best to ban / severely handicap competition and crack down on opensource. It's a major threat to their existence.
Edit: A couple queries with it indicate it will still assist with malware analysis and considers it beneficial. Hopefully it stays that way.
Several others have done similar to greater or lesser degrees in calendar 2026, but the pressure is there across the board to limit what the open models can do without modifications that could largely only be found locally and not from online providers.
This is what an Anthropic dev said:
>"to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game"
This just means exact clones, not reverse-engineering. The article is blatantly lying. And easy to disprove by... trying it yourself.
love this term, knew instantly what it means
But most frameworks don't come even close to CSS and all the possibilities to create custom controls. It often requires to build everything from scratch in code, which is really hard for more complex layouts.
We developed on Windows NT and deployed onto HP/UX and Solaris.
A bit like a translator who doesnt speak the language but has Google translate and a few beers in them right?
For example, is there still a massive .clone() problem in LLM generated Rust?
Personally I was surprised how quickly I surpassed my original code, feature wise. Will it stand the test of time? Too early to tell - need to see if I'm still using the native version of the app in a year. But its been more fun and informative - and fast - than I'd expected.
For what it's worth I wholly agree with your point and that mirrors the personal project I have. But making personal projects a bit more fun and fluent is not the $10T proposition being championed at the professional level.
"I can do it, and you didn't do it, therefore you must be lazy, because I certainly am not lazy"
What's lazy is not diving into the reasons that people may or may not do things.
Incidentally, I think it's kind of ableist to toss around the concept of ableism this lightly. Disability is a set of concrete barriers which go unacknowledged and a set of real accommodations which go unimplemented. Disability activism entails acknowledging those barriers and implementing those accommodations; it does not entail the idea that everyone is always trying their best and nobody is ever negligent.
"No one gets TWO sticks of RAM until everyone has at least ONE stick of RAM!"
On the netbook, well.. CWM, UXterm, Dillo, CLI/TUI mail, usenet, IRC and so on clients, groff, nsxiv, mpv, MuPDF... it runs snappier than the NUC for what it does. Programming? Golang for networking stuff -security, not like Rust, but far better than C-, simple C99 for small software, or S9/JimTCL. Otter Browser for emergencies (JS pages from public institutions/govts in my country).
Also naming your company "__slop" is a bold move!
Thanks haha hitslop, it means "a property used to increase the interactive touch area of a component beyond its visible layout boundaries", which I thought was so funny when I came across it. Owned the domain since 2020, knew it would come in handy eventually!
Maybe we should collectively use more of our personal tokens to re/write, extend and mix up the common(s) stacks at this point?
Such a rewrite would have been unthinkable 2 years ago, but now it's table stakes.
But.. maybe, maybe this is the opposite of google translate in the 00's - maybe, if you keep porting back and forth, you will eventually arrive at perfection :P
I've always disliked Electron apps in principle. The idea was you could write once, run anywhere, which is something we've heard before so many times but it never really works out that way. Back in the early days of Java we heard this mantra with applets and Java desktop apps and the reality was "write once, test everywhere".
The cost is simply too high. Nobody wants an entire browser engine packaged to run a desktop app. Security-wise, this is a nightmare. It's such a huge attack surface (eg [1]). And resource-wise it's also a nightmare. Honestly, Electron apps can't die fast enough for my liking.
What I think we'll see is a return to desktop apps because the cost of porting them to new platforms is dropping like a rock.
There are modding issues with Discord's migration but I believe modding itself is going to be an issue in a world where it's going to be increasingly easy to find and use exploits.
I also wonder if Discord is the best we can do here. I've always hated Discord from a UI/UX perspective. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMHO). There are like 3 different settings buttons. You join a Discord and you get yet another custom flow of having to go to this channel and select roles and do something before you can do something else blah blah blah. Everything feels shoe horned. And Discord channels are a worse repository for information than the old forums were.
[1]: https://www.sentinelone.com/vulnerability-database/cve-2026-...
15 years reading the verge without subscription. What happened?
> It’s not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”
soon™
And yeah, The Verge was one of my favorite resources earlier too but I've stopped visiting it due to subscription requirement on most articles.
So, yeah, enjoy rebuilding complete browsers, I guess? I'm sure they'll run more efficiently than the rendering engines that have been refined and tweaked over the course of now multiple decades.
Well, unless you leave out the annoying stuff, like a11y, IME, RTL, but who needs those things anyway, am I right.
Then you find out that iterating on a fully Rust-based app is sloooow, so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Congratulations. You've built a browser, just with fewer features, more bugs, and probably higher RAM usage. Good job.
Compared to Electron, there is no browser, so binaries are a much smaller, use less memory, startup is fast. And the attack surface is also much smaller (no XSS)
There is absolutely no reason for Discord—a chat application—to run everything a browser does. Why do I need to play videos in the chat application? Why do individual avatars and even tags have to run custom shaders? It's called scope creep.
> a11y, IME, RTL
All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago. Comes with entire language packs.
> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript
See above: scope creep; features for features' sake.
Chat apps are literally the central example of why Electron is a God-sent. Here's a video from a Rust guy explaining why there are quite a bit of reasons to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws .
Now i consider that a must have.
Similar for emojis...
It turns out a chat app is about human interaction, not exchanging text, and in human interaction context is a big deal. All these things add context to the chat environment.
Fortunately IRC still works, and you can go enjoy your text only environment if you want!
You know exactly that the moment that Discord launches a new version that no longer plays videos, people will whine about it.
> All of this can be done at the platform level. Win32 did this three decades ago.
Yeah, but they're porting to Rust and GPUI and not that.
Maybe not anymore. I don't work on any Chrome-sized Rust codebases so I don't know, but iterating on anything is so much faster that it might work out fine.
What top-level engineering experience led you to believe the magic of multiple decades guaranteeing improvements?
Artcraft it's doing that in every software application;
> so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Every Arftcraft software can be command line driven and it's still fast and small compared to your bloated crap.
edit: there is one https://github.com/Sidenai/sidex haven't tried it yet
If all products ditch Electron, it satisfies the NSA requirements of having AI-generated backdoors on your computer, while allowing you to reduce your RAM consumption and letting this precious silicon for Sam Altman (He's quoted saying RAM is better spent in data centers than in personal computers - and in an era where everything is Cloud, one might wonder why the base Macbook Pro has 32GB).