Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ameliaquining » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

porridgeraisin wrote: post #74

mort96 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is WebKitGTK as used by Tauri worse than WebKitGTK used by a web app user's web browser?

No. But also, nobody(first order approximation) uses Gnome web. I would wager most javascript web apps don't work on that browser anyways due to webkitgtk. The most popular gnome distros all come with firefox installed so even the "just use the default" folks won't be using gnome web.

WebKitGTK benefits from sharing a codebase with WebKit for iOS, which web developers do care about supporting. There can still be bugs in the Linux-specific platform integration code, but that's not most of the codebase, so any given app is less likely to run across a bug in it. It's not as reliable as more mainstream browser-OS combinations, but saying that most apps don't work is an exaggeration.

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

#142

Post by sillyboi » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

It would be great to see an up-to-date benchmark comparing modern cross-platform frameworks like Tauri, Flutter, Electron, React Native, and others.

Key metrics could include:

- Target bundle size

- Memory usage (RAM)

- Startup time

- CPU consumption under load

- Disk usage

- e.t.c.

Additionally, for frameworks like Tauri, it would be useful to include a WebView compatibility matrix, since the rendering behavior and performance can vary significantly depending on the WebView version used on each platform (e.g., macOS WKWebView vs. Windows WebView2, or Linux GTK WebKit). This divergence can affect both UI fidelity and performance, so capturing those differences in a visual format or table could help developers make more informed choices.

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

#143

Post by devwastaken » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

You didnt rebuild in Rust. you built a wrapper around a Webview. that webview still uses the same resources as if youd have used webkit directly.

your application is now at the whim of version breaks by the OS browser.

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

#144

Post by joshterrill » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

I'm curious how you're implementing the image similarity matching. I recently reverse engineered the Apple Neural Hash model and wrote an API to use it in my app for doing image similarity calculations. I found it to be extremely quick compared to some of the other more computationally intensive methods that I was trying to use before.

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

#145

Post by hombre_fatal » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

divan wrote: 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.

On the other hand, they shipped, proved the product, and got their first paying customers with a web stack. And the top HN comment thread is people talking about the downsides of Tauri cross-platform.

It's all trade-offs, unfortunately.

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

#146

Post by mac-mc » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

How much of it was the UI, and how much of was the non-ux code? Could've you achieved many of the same gains by creating a local backend in rust for things like indexing and leaving the UI as a more lightweight electron app while saving a lot more time in a rewrite? How much dev time was the UX rewrite compared to the backend rewrite?

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

#147

Post by Klonoar » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

ameliaquining wrote: post #141

porridgeraisin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But also, nobody(first order approximation) uses Gnome web. I would wager most javascript web apps don't work on that browser anyways due to webkitgtk. The most popular gnome distros all come with firefox installed so even the "just use the default" folks won't be using gnome web.

WebKitGTK benefits from sharing a codebase with WebKit for iOS, which web developers do care about supporting. There can still be bugs in the Linux-specific platform integration code, but that's not most of the codebase, so any given app is less likely to run across a bug in it. It's not as reliable as more mainstream browser-OS combinations, but saying that most apps don't work is an exaggeration.

Last I checked, WebkitGTK does not have parity with WebKit on iOS, and plenty of devs do test on that platform anyway - so I'm not sure what you're talking about? You're right to correct someone saying _most_ apps don't work, but it's also not cool to just sweep the WebkitGTK issue under the rug and pretend it's not an issue at all. It's bitten plenty of people who build on Tauri.

Additionally, the issues people find with WebkitGTK/Tauri aren't always web related, usually moreso Linux related (weird blank screens, issues with rendering certain stacked items, etc).

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

#148

Post by james2doyle » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

_bent wrote: post #117

divan wrote: 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.

True. But this is actively being worked on by Canonical: https://ubuntu.com/blog/multiple-window-flutter-desktop

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

#149

Post by ameliaquining » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

yojo wrote: post #62

krisknez wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a web developer and haven't used Tauri or Electron much yet. I am wondering why rendering differences between different platforms are such an issue? When building web apps, you face the same challenges, so I would assume it wouldn't be much different.

The promise of Electron is the version of chrome you develop on is the version that ships with your app. If it looks right on your machine, it looks right on whoever is running it. This is much nicer than when doing web development and deciding which browsers/browser versions to test and support. Tauri does not bundle chrome with your app. This makes the bundle size much smaller. But the tradeoff is you end up render…

Does anyone actually choose to ship an Electron app instead of a web app in order to benefit from UI consistency? Most Electron apps I've seen either share a codebase with a web app that's also made available (so the codebase still has to be tested cross-browser), or else can't be web apps because they need full filesystem privileges or otherwise don't work with the browser's security model.

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

#150

Post by cosmic_cheese » Wed, May 28, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #44

mort96 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with the rendering differences isn't any more difficult with Tauri than it is when making a normal web app, is it?

No, WebkitGTK is notoriously an issue.

The Linux port of Orion (Kagi’s power user oriented web browser) is built with WebKitGTK, some hopefully the Orion team will be patching up some of the more glaring issues. At minimum the port will put it in front of pairs of eyeballs that hadn’t been looking at it before which should help bring attention to bugs.