I want to like this, ever since it was called eul. But features are consistently pushed back which suggests that the dev doesnt have a great handle on what is going on, the availability of mac/linux versions seems consistently misleading, it’s not open source, and it uses icons of services not available (e.g. gmail) in a way that seems dishonest. idk.
I love the idea of this — it consistently baffles me how poorly web apps primarily serving me text perform — but I'd love to see a little breakdown telling me what's been cut out to make it so lean. I mean, maybe it's stuff I don't care about, but on the other hand maybe it's some file integration I use regularly, you know? On the other hand maybe it's a bunch of RAM-sucking junk and absurd text rendering that I'd just as soon do without.
I'd love it if it was open source or at least public in some way considering the security questions. I realize that's a bit of a pony request but it is one of the things I've come to rely on in the community, that someone is curious enough to dig in and relay their findings.
Oh for sure. I'm not a developer myself though so I don't know whether there are capabilities you lose such as common libraries and whatnot, and what the trade-offs are there. For all I know it includes or eschews certain javascript that's notoriously bad, or has to reach out to Slack for emoji calls, or whatever. A couple hundred words of documentation on this topic would really help me understand the product better.
Interesting back story on why he created the "V" language to develop Volt:
"Originally Volt app was written in Go, but after a couple of weeks of development I decided to re-write it in C for two reasons: easier integration with existing C graphics and UI libraries and much smaller binaries. The app size reduced from ~5 MB to ~100 KB.
C development is not very productive, so I spent two weeks in October 2017 to create a very light and minimalistic language that can seamlessly interop with C. I called it V (the name is not final).
V compiler is written in V. The language will be open-sourced later in 2019."
More than a little disingenuous. While they advertise that the app supports a number of services, when you actually download the app and try it only Slack and Skype are available - the rest are "coming later in February"
They? Maybe 'they' is just a 'lone developer' who works in his spare time on this b/c he doesn't like bloated Electrons. And maybe it's difficult to work for free... -- If I were him, I'd immediately retract the promise to release as open source. Who knows what happens and if Patreon works out? I feel quite a sense of entitlement here.
Developer here. An unexpected surge of traffic => I'm on HN front page again:)
V and Volt got lots of attention 5 days ago. Thousands of people downloaded the beta version and I've been working hard to fix all the crashes and bugs people reported.
I was planning to release the Windows beta by the end of the day. So hopefully Windows and Linux (wine) users will be able to try it out today.
Yeah, I tried the native Linux app for Signal and while it works its also a huge resource hog. So much so that my machine started swapping when I had a browser open alongside it. For what is effectively AIM + encryption. This is the future that people warned us about back when Node.js was new.
More likely people will start developing with compiled languages, compiling down to WebAssembly, then still use Electron for the UI end just for the cross platform support.
That doesnt really address what I said. I was saying, the underlying components will need to be built into the OS, for battery life and memory reuse purposes. So you dont end up with 50 slightly different copies of blink/node running at the same time. Blink/node are what are powering electron.
Looks promising.
But will only be Open Source in "2021" according to https://github.com/voltapp/volt ... until then it's a root-kit for all we know that people are voluntarily installing.
> not using anything that contain at least single line of closed/proprietary code
It's not just that. The existence of source code doesn't mean the binaries are uninfected. You'd have to actually build it yourself from source. And even then, unless you've audited the source, you're still not sure. Of course, you'd have to build that compiler from source (that you've audited) using...? And all that on an OS with libc, libdl etc that you've built yourself.
But how do you know that this closed source software isn't evil? You can't distinguish without an audit by a competent person you trust. Most closed source software isn't audited to a level that I'd deem sufficient for my security.
The problem is even worse: proprietary software has a single owner that can be coerced into including (even targeted) backdoors by state level attackers.
If I really want to run proprietary software I typically try to containerize it or even run it in VMs.
I do sometimes make exceptions, but definitely not for such crucial applications as main communicator. Plus there are other practical reasons to try to limit yourself to FLOSS than fear of hidden malware.
Sorry, it's a really early release. The first public version was released 5 days ago.
For me everything works fine, but this is complex stuff. I'm working hard on fixing things. I wish people would wait a couple of weeks before posting this.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get a little put off by phrases like "for all major web services."
Who decided which web services are major? There are certainly a number of "major" services that aren't included depending on how major is really defined.
I don't know. I think it's easily understandable what they meant by "major". Like, you've heard and probably used, every single one of the services listed there.
This is not an official definition of the word "major", it's just a list of services the client is compatible with. They're not insulting a race/religion/nationality, it's just a list of web services you have probably used.
"for all major web services" sounds a lot better than "the web services we like using", and the only two things I'd consider missing are IRC/steam, and with IRC going the way of the dodo and steam not being a super popular messaging service.
Steam support probably wouldn't even make a whole lot of sense, since users likely use it for their game library rather than just a messaging service. Unless this app wants to branch out and start competing with game library managers like Playnite.
