←back to thread

Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

(github.com)
380 points culinary-robot | 1 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.

Show context
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

replies(16): >>45592641 #>>45592675 #>>45592685 #>>45592749 #>>45592802 #>>45593837 #>>45593972 #>>45594122 #>>45594253 #>>45596410 #>>45598979 #>>45600393 #>>45600936 #>>45601342 #>>45601747 #>>45605373 #
1718627440 ◴[15 Oct 25 14:02 UTC] No.45592749[source]▶
There I quite a lot of desktop apps in Python. But for example if you use Tkinter, it looks awful on Linux and if you choose Gtk, you need to build the python version on Windows manually in minGW or ship Cygwin.
replies(1): >>45599014 #
gertop ◴[15 Oct 25 22:21 UTC] No.45599014[source]▶
That's more of a GTK problem than a python one. It sucks on all platforms that isn't Linux.

In my experience apps using pyqt5/6 have a much nicer interface and cross platform experience.

replies(1): >>45599603 #
1. 1718627440 ◴[15 Oct 25 23:30 UTC] No.45599603[source]▶
How does Qt help with that it isn't implemented in Python, so you need a binary, which is OS specific? GTK wasn't that hard either once I had figured out how MinGW works. All you essentially need is to setup a working C compiler for Windows. You don't even need to figure that out yourself, because all you need to do is to tell the MSYS2 package manager to install a python version, that has GTK support.

In my opinion the problem is more that support for more Toolkits isn't built into Python so you essentially need to deal with another language as well, which sucks when you only know python.

Distributing Python for Windows is even harder than for Linux.