I find it funny that backend devs will do all this infrastructure work to support billions of real time messages and then frontend devs stomp all over it by making the app take 500MB of RAM and hundreds of ms to take basic actions.
I agree with you that we should care more about resource usage, but it's a false comparison. Backend devs control where their code runs, frontend devs don't.
You can make more precise decisions when you have complete control over the environment. When you don't, you have to make trade-offs. In this case, universality (electron and javascript) for higher RAM usage. It doesn't seem to have slowed Discord's adoption rate.
Even if they built their desktops apps in native code and UI, they'd have to build a JS website in parallel.
It's a fair point. I think loss-aversion over React (Native) is to blame.
Their current client stack is:
Web: React
Desktop: React + Electron
Mobile: React Native + Native
Their commitment to React on so many platforms makes it easy to accumulate bloat. Their need to support lower-level features means they can't avoid native code altogether.
I wonder why they stick with it.
My guess is they don't want to add more hires just for this problem
Backend performance issues can grind your system to a halt. It’s basically a requirement for Discord to work reliably.
Front-end performance is not a hard requirement for most end users, unless the app is actually unusable. Discord isn’t that bad compared to some software I’ve used. You have to get beach balls on startup and complete UI freezes for people to really care. If it’s good enough for most people, shaving some MB off the memory usage or small number of ms off latency isn’t important to the business
Given how intelligent people are, I would not be surprised if this is by choice. They probably don't want poor pleba using their software anyway, just those with money to spare
You can't buy client performance, so it is just more visible. It's not like there are a lot of people with Rust/C++ back ends outside of some very critical pieces.
