You might wanna check it out. Things like code quotes and expand/collapse would be cool to add to an IRC client. I think some clients already support emoji as it's just UTF8?

It's common for IRC users to use IRC from a terminal client on their desktop. If they have a remote server they'll ssh into a box and use their terminal client there. They'd also use a screen session to keep their IRC client running 24/7 so they can keep receiving messages. Or they'll keep an eggdrop bot on a server somewhere, which is basically a sorta IRC proxy that they connect to from any IRC client and can keep their user online in the background.

Here's some stuff on IRC: https://github.com/ircdocs/modern-irc | https://ircv3.net/ | https://wiki.wireshark.org/IRC

Looks like there's some discord<->IRC gateways: https://github.com/sjwhitak/discord-irc-matrix https://github.com/qaisjp/go-discord-irc https://discordrc.com/

Here's some IRC stuff in Go: https://github.com/khlieng/dispatch https://github.com/ergochat/ergo https://github.com/go-irc/irc https://github.com/search?q=go+irc