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Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

(github.com)
380 points culinary-robot | 3 comments | 15 Oct 25 11:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I started working on Halloy back in 2022, with the goal of giving something back to the community I’ve been a part of for the past two decades. I wanted to create a modern, multi-platform IRC client written in Rust.

Three years later, I’ve made new friends who have become core contributors, and there are now over 200 people idling in our #halloy channel on Libera.

My hope is that this client will outlive me and that IRC will live on.

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mattfrommars ◴[15 Oct 25 13:48 UTC] No.45592515[source]▶
I've started to notice there are a lot more rust based desktop application appearing vs say Go based or Java. Most of these apps are cross platforms. My guess is they are trying to compete with Electron. There is Tauri runs on Rust.

Can someone please tell me what special about Rust? Say, why aren't desktop application popular based on say Python?

On tangent, ive seen a lot of terminal base application in typescript and go

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1. righthand ◴[15 Oct 25 14:06 UTC] No.45592802[source]▶
Rust produces a single binary. Developers appreciate this when shipping an app. For Python based apps you usually need your user to have Python installed and then ship a bunch of Python files with interop to some non-Python UI library. So you probably need to ship the UI library as a dependency too.

Or you can just build it in Rust and learn what .unwrap() does.

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2. az09mugen ◴[15 Oct 25 18:19 UTC] No.45596518[source]▶
I don't say it is best, but there are solutions like pyinstaller [0] to produce a binary from python code.

[0] https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/

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3. righthand ◴[16 Oct 25 17:52 UTC] No.45608531[source]▶
This just obfuscates the issue not actually fixes it. This is 1 binary + all the previously mentioned files.