> 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.

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gobdovan a day ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 a day ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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sophacles a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

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hendrikmans a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.