DropBox is the Electron client of file sharing. They could make native apps that use native apis and get vastly better performance in time, power, cpu, and probably memory — but then they’d have to create and maintain a bunch of native apps. I know it’s common to hear HN comments like “they have the money/skill/opportunity to trade up to a better platform for more effort”, but everything I’ve seen says that it’s much harder to make that choice than to stick with the tech-debt you already have.

Note: I’m not saying it’s literally an electron client. It’s an analogy. :)

It does bundle Chromium so it isn’t far off.

I get it don't worry. Maybe they'll do it later when it will be an obvious advantage for the company.

It's particularly funny because they hired Guido (GVR) who is supposedly helping them migrate a million(s) lines of code py2->py3. Whereas a better solution in the long run would have probably been just rewriting the whole damn thing in Rust for all platforms.

Rust doesn't sound too unrealistic, given that they were one of its first big commercial users.

they do rust ? fun

They use Rust in the datacenter. The layer that actually writes bits to disk is written in Rust. I don't know why they haven't yet deployed a native desktop client that's a Rust core with a thin platform-native GUI wrapper.

Jamie Turner from Dropbox gave a talk at a Rust meetup in 2017: https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-may-2017/

Edit: at 30:05 in that video, he briefly talks about a forthcoming (as of 2017) "full redesign + rewrite of Dropbox's 'sync engine' in Rust." He claims it will use 10x less memory, and be 50x faster on key operations.

The also mention it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926851

strings /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Frameworks/libdropbox_watchdog.dylib | grep -i rust shows some hits:

  __ZN14rustc_demangle8demangle17h2ad719809986c0fcE
  _rust_begin_unwind
  /Users/vagrant/client-dropbox-python/dropbox-virtual-env-3985da1e510f-mac-x86_64-10.14/rust/lib/rustlib/x86_64-apple-darwin/lib/libcompiler_builtins-f10e664516557f83.rlib(compiler_builtins-f10e664516557f83.compiler_builtins.7wkmozn8-cgu.0.rcgu.o)
  ___rust_probestack
  /Users/travis/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/compiler_builtins-0.1.5/src/probestack.rs
  ___rust_alloc
  ___rust_dealloc
  ___rust_realloc
  ___rust_alloc_zeroed
  /Users/vagrant/src/client/rust_vendor/hyper-0.10.13/src/buffer.rs
  /Users/vagrant/src/client/rust_vendor/serde_json-1.0.33/src/read.rs
  ...

Looks like they use it fairly lightly though.

Thanks for the link, missed it