> It's because a) people want high resolution,

This cannot be any serious part of the reason, since literally playing 3D video games fullscreen at full resolution can use less power than Discord.

[EDIT] For that matter, any streaming video platform. They're ~all extremely battery-efficient even when pushing 4k.

Video games have optimized rendering pipelines and assets.

Discord is showing emojis, images that are 10MB+ each, and all kinds of user generated crap at high res that it doesn't have control over. Personally I'd prefer to go back to just text.

Of course they have control over it, it’s literally their own platform. There’s no reason that Discord can’t benefit from the same optimizations that video games use. If a AAA title can figure out how to render 100000+ polygons UV wrapped with several 4K resolution textures in the span of 16 ms, then a $15B valued company can certainly figure out to display emojis and large images without turning your notebook into a DIY stovetop.

I assume Discord is built with electron. That should answer all your questions. Personally i dont use web apps on desktop..use discord in browser never had any issues

how much CPU/GPU power do you think it takes to display an image? Do you think this is something that video games have never had to do?

And if Discord is rendering a 10MB+ image then that's definitely a problem with discord. 1920x1080 at 8bpp isn't even 10MB.

Video playback is low power primarily because GPUs (even embedded ones) have dedicated hardware for video decoding. Video chat requires also encoding video, which not all gpus provide hardware for. CPU encoding video is a very energy intensive task especially as the resolution increases.

A macbook with a built-in webcam doesn't provide robust and low-power hardware encoding for video that camera captures? I should see battery life plummet if I use Quicktime to record video through it, then... right? There shouldn't exist battery efficient screencast apps for these computers... right?

I don't think this excuse flies on anything made in the last 10 years, at least, except maybe trash-tier netbooks or something. Unless the software is so amateurish that it doesn't even try to negotiate a codec that suits the hardware it's running on, and just picks something evidently-poorly-supported no matter what.

Good points. You have successfully made me revisit my assumptions!

I know that intel macbooks added hardware encoding from iphones into the T2 chip in part to solve this problem, but I also know that intel has quick sync, which should provide hardware encoding as well, and I didn't know what the pros/cons are. according to this article [1] the T2 chip seems to be much faster than intel quick sync, so that could be a factor, but it doesn't seem to cover power efficiency.

From a timeline perspective, Intel quick sync has been around on at least some Intel CPUs since 2011 and has been supported on osx since Mountain Lion (2012)[2], and the T2 chip first appeared in the Macbook pro in 2017 [3].

That would point to there being more at play than just absence of hardware video decoder. So I think you are right. At least _some_ hardware that can encode video efficiently has existed on macbooks for a while, and it seems like video conferencing applications should be taking advantage of it.

While it is always possible that the hardware could solve this problem, but the software doesn't make use of it, I have a feeling any software that did have correct use of encoding hardware would have gained a lot of marketshare, and people would be talking about it.

My next followup questions would be:

1) Were these computers in fact using hardware encoding, but the efficiency was not good enough for long battery life?

2) Is there some limitation to QuickSync and possibly other hardware solutions that makes them impractical for realtime use? Possibilities include:

    - Maybe they are throughput optimized, and to work efficiently must take in large chunks of data at a time, which could increase latency beyond what would be acceptable for video calling

    - Maybe they can't simultaneously do video decode and encode (it seems at least some generations of QuickSync couldn't do this)

    - Maybe the hardware encoding isn't configurable enough to provide a low bandwidth typically used for video conferencing.

I was unable to find answers to these in ~1h of googling. Would love it if someone here knows.

1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/09/apples-t2-chip-ma...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Develop...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2#History

Doesn't every consumer AMD/nVidia GPU and every consumer Intel CPU (as long as it has integrated graphics) made in the last 10 years have hardware accelerated H.264 encoding?

Yes, and it's probably good enough, but Nvidia's produces noticeably green (ironic) video. It's not a good encoder by any means.

I think intel quicksync also has that(random green screen) sometimes. The only one not suffered from it is amd hardware encoding. But the encode quality is worse than the other two. Sometimes to the point that I want to just disable it.

It's not about cutting corners. It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer.

That being said I would love to have less memory allocation on my devices when effectively idle too.

The aspects you mention mostly make things easier for the developer side, not for the user side, which get only the indirect advantage of a more feature rich app.

If you want to do things properly, you hire separate teams who do native development for each platform, or you hire one Qt team for desktop and two teams for the two app platforms. Of course that's expensive, but again developer vs user side. That's what I mean by cutting corners.

And regarding electron there are different kinds of apps performance wise, like Atom vs VS Code. Discord is more on the Atom side of things, sadly.

Discord is also so big, that interested people develop lean third party clients for it. It's possible, but Discord rather bans them and forces users on the worse electron/web alternative.

>It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer.

One might consider these as cutting corners - hiring web developers to build an app that really should be native

Most of this is false. Ripcord achieves near-feature-parity with the official Discord and Slack apps using cross-platform desktop technologies with a fraction of the resource usage with a single developer.

Ripcord's very existence contradicts most of the claims you've made above.

You can also just look at how many developers it took to build similar programs, native and cross-platform, in, say, the 90s and early 00s. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of them had smaller teams for all platforms combined than Discord has for its single desktop client. Yet one would hope we've gotten more efficient at software development since then, and the entire excuse for using things like Electron is supposed to be that it saves a whole bunch of developer hours—but then you look at how tiny teams were on some of even the fairly-big programs back then, and all our "more-correct" processes and technologies start to look pretty damn suspect.

I only ever used it for small GUIs for some scientific computing I did back in college, so maybe it's hard to use for larger projects, but the impression that I remember of Qt was that it had a pretty large component library, extensive documentation, and a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG UI editor!

The workflow that I've seen for frontend coding today is that a designer makes a mockup in something like Figma, and then a frontend programmer has to go remake it from scratch in typescript? It seems crazy that we have not made any progress (or even regressed) here in 15 years, but hopefully I'm just out of the loop on state of the art.

> a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG UI editor!

I like Qt for how much it enables us to do, but having worked with Qt Designer, it can get off the rails once things get too complex. Probably doesn't help when you enable/disable UI elements programmatically, but still lol

Yeah, I think you guys are right. It's like the history of vitamin C and scurvy on ships. We seem to have collectively lost some very obvious and straightforward knowledge

The usual explanation is that non-JavaScript devs (every programmer over the age of 40) was an amazing genius, and we need Electron/Flutter/Node/left-pad/etc now since there are so many new coders. I think you're on to something though. Somehow modern practices just result in wasting incredible amounts of time and effort tinkering with fiddly frameworks and boilerplate code

How can you say Discord has the worst software engineering when they serve millions of active users with little downtime?

Seriously. More users than Slack, and I assume 99% of them are on a free plan too. Their engineering blog talks about some of the problems they deal with at that scale, impressive stuff:

https://discord.com/category/engineering

I made that comment about the worst software engineering in the context of this discussion, which is about the frontend. If discord had good fronted software engineering, it wouldn't be as bloated. With good software engineering you can make even web/electron apps fairly lightweight (compare Atom with VS Code).

It's basically IRC with an enormous amount of bloat tacked on. Every time it upgrades - which is obnoxiously often - it'll have some new feature they want to force on me and I have to click on a popup to dismiss it so that I can do what I intended when I started it. And they've started injecting their politics into it too, which you'll see on startup now and then.

The mobile app is sitting in my "notification jail" folder three pages deep too, where apps that abuse badge notifications are kept.

What does "injecting their politics" mean? Like, adding rainbows for users who want representation in their profiles, and emojis? Are you that booty-twisted over some rainbows? Is HN the right place to tell you to touch grass, or should we take this over to Reddit?

I like it how it goes straight to "touch grass" when someone has a slightly different belief to someone else. Of course it must be unreasonable if they disagree with me!

Its a profile theme. Touch grass.

What a fitting username!

No, they're unreasonable because they're unreasonable. You're entitled to your pithy little opinions, but that doesn't mean they're correct. Come correct or stay home.

Are you the arbiter of correct ? I'm glad we all groupthink exactly the same like the automatons you are.

Correct when it comes to politics has, and always will be a matter of opinion, no matter what one group may pressure everyone to believe.

SUPPORT YOUR OPINIONS OR GO HOME.

Nope. Sorry. Your personal politics and opinions can be objectively, morally, ethically, legally, and practically wrong. On the topic of "woke" content, e.g. rainbows, gay representation, black history, etc., being against people being allowed to express themselves in ways that affirm themselves in ways that are best for the mental health and well-being, being allowed to love whomever they love without fear of legal or moral backlash, teach the true history of a people including the icky parts that certain demographics would prefer to keep hidden from the sunlight, and exposing the injustices of this country from a historical and contemporary context, IS morally, ethically, objectively, practically, and hopefully someday sooner rather than later legally wrong.

Your opinion, thank fucking god, does not matter. It's not "groupthink", insofar as all we are are just people who agree that treating human beings with basic dignity regardless of their social or racial standing isn't groupthink, just common fucking sense and what a decent person should do at the barest of minimums. And if you oppose that, guess what? You're on the wrong side of history, society, and progress. IF you don't like it, you're free to leave. But we're not going anywhere, so try not to cut yourself while seething at our existence.

Also make sure you subscribe to Discord Nitro, so you can upload longer clips of you talking to your camera in the cab of your 2017 Ford F150 Superduty wearing wraparound shades.

Also, nope sorry ;)

Interesting that asking for open discussion with supporting evidence pushes so many buttons for you.

Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Thanks for the input though. I feel like that we each have a responsibility to call out unreasonable comments when we see it. I hope you all do this when it counts and not just when it's easy.

The phrase "call out" is a bit of a red flag on HN because it's associated with all the worst flamewar, culture war, and internet drama stuff. You can make a substantive, thoughtful point showing how someone else is wrong without resorting to "call out" or shaming.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread (and elsewhere, unfortunately) will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

The worst software engineering? Have you met Teams? The flagship chat application from the world’s biggest software company, which is often unable to send chat messages

So, second worst is better, then? Btw the Teams product is not a "chat solution", but a workspace collaboration tool; chat is just a small part of it. And now I feel dirty from defending the steaming pile of garbage that is Teams :)