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Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

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Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#111

Why did you bundle Redis and not use one of the many key value libraries available for Rust (or even sqlite)?

For vector search we couldn't get my results to return meaningful entries. My preference would have been to use sqlite. Any others you recommend besides sqlite with the vss extension?

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#114
post #14

I recently went the other way (started a project in Tauri, moved to Electron) because of frustration with rendering differences between the web views employed on different platforms. Have you run into any cross platform UI bugs since you switched? It looks like your UI needs are pretty simple while computation is complex so the extra QA tradeoff would still be worth it for you. I'm just wondering if my experience was…

I had the exact same experience and switched from Tauri 2.0 to Electron after a month.

No only were there UI inconsistencies, but Safari lags behind chrome with things like the Popover API and the build/codesign/CD ecosystem for Tauri is incredibly scattered.

When I was using it, IAPs were still not really an option for Tauri or at least I could not find any docs or resources about it.

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#116
post #14

I recently went the other way (started a project in Tauri, moved to Electron) because of frustration with rendering differences between the web views employed on different platforms. Have you run into any cross platform UI bugs since you switched? It looks like your UI needs are pretty simple while computation is complex so the extra QA tradeoff would still be worth it for you. I'm just wondering if my experience was…

You’re post honeymoon.

“We moved from X to Y and were so in love.” posts are often postcards from the honeymoon.

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#117
post #105

It's sad to witness how much suffering developers are ready to endure (and make their users suffer) just not to part ways with HTML/CSS/JS stack. The stack that was never designed properly, let alone for modern UI apps. Flutter would be much better choice for such a desktop app, for example.

you still can't have multiple windows with flutter, which disqualifies it for building desktop apps.

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a rust developer, I do too! Those are not representative of rust GUI/3D etc desktop applications. I've made some pretty complicated stuff with 2D and 3D graphics, lots of functionality; expected size is 5-15Mb on Windows, and 10-25Mb on Linux. Less if you don't need 3D.

is there a UI framework production ready yet in rust??? because for Tauri at least you can use JS which is fine

yeah slint, which is most similar to Qt

see https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#119
post #14

I recently went the other way (started a project in Tauri, moved to Electron) because of frustration with rendering differences between the web views employed on different platforms. Have you run into any cross platform UI bugs since you switched? It looks like your UI needs are pretty simple while computation is complex so the extra QA tradeoff would still be worth it for you. I'm just wondering if my experience was…

Just recently Tauri announced:

> This year we've got a lot of exciting innovations in store for you, like CEF and SERVO based webviews...

From their discord.

Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

#120
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually haven't rolled out cross platform support yet with the Tauri version, so we will see how that goes. Our UI needs are simple, luckily. What kind of rendering differences were you seeing with Tauri? Was there one platform that worked the best/worst for your app? We'd love to support Windows next. With the Electron version of the app, we had issues running our bundled binaries on Macs with Intel chip. That c…

Nothing flat out broke, but I am developing and dogfooding on a Mac, so I get visual QA for free on that platform. When I tested my app on a Windows machine, I noticed several UI regressions that looked/felt really janky. I didn't get as far as testing a Linux build, but I assume I'd find more issues there. I can't remember why I wanted to migrate to 2.0 now, but there was a nice-to-have that I couldn't do in 1.4. I…

Interesting you ran into UI regressions on Windows. I'm looking forward for us to get to that point where we can test on a Windows and see what changes...hopefully it's smooth.

With Electron's UI powered by the same browser across platforms, you end up with a much more consistent experience. Makes sense to optimize for that.

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