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Personally I care about the security of the server (is it written in a language that historically has a good or poor track record), and I care a great deal about the client.

The Slack client regularly pauses for me while I am typing, randomly refreshes, and generally feels sluggish. Those aren't things I associate with Go. That said, I think this particular implementation's client is also written in Javascript, so I don't know that it will have a particular advantage there. But an open source implementation at least won't block alternative clients (e.g. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fas...), in a way that the Slack Terms of Service would seem to do.



I audited Mattermost 1.x through 3.x a while back. Had some issues but everything was fixed smoothly and from 3.x it is actually really good. Slides from my talk on it here: https://speakerdeck.com/addelindh/hacking-mattermost-an-asse...


Thanks @addelindh! Really love your work. You helped us a ton, highly appreciated!


Thanks yourself, you and your team is a pleasure to work with.


The desktop clients are built on Electron [1]. I've been using it for about 3 weeks and there's been a few times where performance issues were noticeable but not bad enough for me to start digging in the code to find the issue. Overall I think it's a well put together app, but people who hate anything built on Electron will probably have bad things to say about it.

[1] https://github.com/mattermost/desktop


Slack's performance also depends a ton on how much your teams are using it, and how many teams you're on.

"reactjis" are one of the worst offenders -- I've had a channel open with some people messing around with them, and it'll be casually consuming 30% of cpu and 3 gigs of ram on my top-of-the-line macbook.

I would have long since deleted an IRC client that was such a poor performer, but unfortunately there's not any good/complete 3rd party slack clients.


Lots of poorly written webapps give Electron a bad name. Slack, unfortunately does have it's performance issues, but there are other popular chat apps written in Electron that are very performant, even on large teams.


You can just use an IRC client and the IRC bridge...


Hey - i made that kickstarter! Unfortunately it doesn't seem there was much interest so it went nowhere. I still think it's regrettable how resource-hungry the official client is, but doesn't seem that too many people share that opinion.




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