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Will the rust ai slop be better than the electron humanslop?
"Hey Claude, rewrite our dogshit Electron app in Rust, make no mistakes".
Hey Claude, add Discord branding to this template so that I may show off Windows task manager.
"But don't forget to keep all the existing mistakes, those are intentional"
I think that the headline says more about Electron than it does about Rust.
Yeah exactly. "Just" 240 MB, it's still a lot for a glorified chat app
240 is quite little considering how much media there's in it
Perhaps it’s vibecoded slop?
I'd be willing to bet $100 that AI assistance was involved in creating this new client, yes.
Similarly I'd bet the same amount that AI assistance was involved in building the former electron-based client
Windows 98 required far less disk space and was a complete operating system - that is if you consider Win98 an operating system...
Even the guys who invented Electron (developers of the Atom text editor) stopped using it years ago and switched to Rust when writing their new editor, Zed, and its UI framework GPUI (which Discord will be using too).
Maybe we don’t want to use JavaScript for literally everything.
It’s great to see it. I wonder how much of this push comes from the high price of memory.
The price of memory-thing is probably not that important as compared to the AI-assisted coding thing. Making things in Rust when you have access to AI tools is dead simple, which was always the argument for making things in Electron. Porting things from one language to another also happens to be one of the sweet spots for AI coding tools, they thrive on tasks that have very clear specs - an already existing codebase with tests is just about as clear of a spec as you can get.
Discord is as much spyware as anything else. Its efficiency in using my computer's resouces in order to log everything about me, build a dossier on me and sell me out at every opportunity is not a consideration, as I view it as something to be avoided like Meta, et al.
That said, Electron does suck.
Vibe coded i guess?
Hmmmm, the first blog posts about rewriting the backend part from Go to Rust are a few years old by now (early 2020) so it's clearly not a "let's vibecode everything in two weeks" kind of project.
However... The later stages are probably vibecoded... Yeah, that would check out today.
I get why vibe coders love Rust - it’s a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot if rustc is checking your lifetimes, but holy shit is the code I’ve seen from them the most unholy mess. Rust is difficult enough to read at the best of times but LLMs don’t even bother with any kind of module structure. Just thousands of lines of vomit in single files and a worrying amount of unsafe.
Preamble: I am a huge LLM/codegen skeptic, for a litany of reasons.
With that said, this honestly sounds like whoever did the prompting didn’t include something like this in the prompt, along with nuanced adversarial review loops:
unsafeblocks are strongly discouraged, and must be specifically justified, and survive antagonistic review by a rust language specialist agent and software security specialist agent. Part of the intent of this reimplementation is to leverage the strengths of the rust language itself, and rampantunsafeusage directly contradicts that.
"It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong."
The ol' reliable.
SMH they forgot to type „make no mistakes“.
Sure, but adding adversarial loops, or, some complex addition to every prompt would increase the token usage massively, thus the cost.
So, why bother with that?
I could very well be wrong, but all indications I’ve seen have been that that the cost of the tokens needed to get something even vaguely acceptable is greater than the cost of just hiring someone, or a group, to do the job. Unless something needs to be done fast due to an immediate concern, and the cost is no object.
Perhaps they run a local model, then tokens are essentially free.
Would need a very beefy cluster, and that definitely isn’t free.
Well yes, I'm not saying it's a free lunch. The point is a large up-front investment buys you unlimited tokens in perpetuity for no more than the cost of electricity to power the cluster — which can be surprisingly cheap for UMA machines.
I've swapped off API models entirely and have been able to do a lot more useful work since I don't have to worry about token cost or usage limits. Granted it's slower per task (less tk/s), but overall much more productive, and private.
Just tell the clanker to use modern practices poof fixed.
Jokes aside a lot of that bad code can be detected by static linting tools and gated on, making it impossible for any of those to reach main.
And this will probably give rust a bad name if most of the code is horrid vibe coded stuff. (Cuck coded?)
99% of new Rust projects today are vibe coded, so probably yeah
Good to see. Electron is trash for a few reasons.
man I love that they are ditching electron but, they "just" fixed the discord linux client to properly update and now they are rehauling it? can't wait to get this update 3 years from now.
It's great, but I wonder what happens with the linux client? There is no mention of it in the article.
Do we get optimized native client or is that too much work if they don't have universal framework anymore?
"Native" sort of loses its meaning in this context - this new client is not "native" in the sense of using the existing GUI tooling for each platform (Cocoa for macOS, any of Microsoft's own frameworks on Windows, primarily Gnome/KDE on Linux).
It is using a universal framework in GPUI, so the experience will be the same on each platform.
It is "native" in the sense that it's not web technology on any of the platforms.
Marketing director of Discord on Reddit says linux will have a native client.
They are using GPUI. Rust native UI framework from the Zed IDE team. I think the creator of Zed is the one who created Electron in the first place, then left. I'm not sure though.
So it should be cross platform
It's a bold strategy. "Electron sucks! Let's see what else these people made".
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
Because rendering things is quite literally the reason GPUs exist, it takes load off the CPU and is more efficient at it to boot.
It doesn't hurt to have the component that is optimized for drawing things to the screen be a bit more involved in drawing things to the screen.
Strictly speaking necessary? No. Does it hurt? Not at all.
With screensharing on wayland? With screensharing on wayland, right?