Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.

to have it act a bit more tabishly, https://halloy.chat/configuration/actions.html#buffer can be set to "replace-pane"

Here's the link for those curious:

Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535772 - June 2023 (101 comments)

I am currently writing a desktop application in Rust. It’s a jellyfin client for music.

I think the main reason is that writing Rust is a joy that gives you confidence. This is important to me as I often have small amounts of time to work on it (new dad). With rust I can start implementing a small feature, as long as it compiles I can be reasonably sure it works. In Python I’d be wading through a sea of runtime errors and never quite sure I actually got it right.

Cross platform is another good reason. UI library support is good. You have iced like this app, but also decent GTK bindings.

No runtime needed makes distribution and packaging infinitely easier than Python.

It’s a great language for writing desktop apps.

I have a background in macOS applications, back when it was Objective-C. I have always loved native apps. When i decided to start Halloy the goal was to create a native application for multiple platforms, and for that Rust is perfect.

> Can someone please tell me what special about Rust?

I think I've seen this topic pop up from time to time ;)

For me personally, I've been replacing a lot of my Python programs with Rust. A lot of it isn't much harder to write, and things like sum types are sorely missed when I write Python or most non-Rust languages. And usually, if my Rust program is a lot more difficult to write, it's because I'm exploring an optimization that wouldn't be possible or worthwhile in Python. Having an application be native and compiled is a big plus for me. I plan to release a desktop app in Rust but it isn't at that stage yet.

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.

Latency. Go and Java with optimizations can work just fine, Python not so much yet.

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.

There are no languages with good GUI frameworks except C, C++ and C#. All other bindings typically suck ass.

It just works, it can do most anything, and it binds well with C.

I was just looking at that; I've been wanting a nice GUI library for Rust but never found one I liked. A number of them were bindings to other GUI stacks. I might try Iced next time I'm poking around with Rust.

Funny enough, having close to zero experience with Rust and wanting to build an iced-rs application with Claude Code, I asked it to search github for large projects using iced-rs to use as a reference and Halloy ones one of the top 3.

I am glad you like it, macmac.