[flagged]
Wrong.
There is at least slint. But it’s not free.
Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
161–170 of 465 posts
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#162[flagged]
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#163I 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…
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#164At a previous company we maintained a desktop electron app for Windows and macOS. It was super bloated though and updates with Squirrel were a pain. We kept the GUI as a web spa app (using Inferno) and wrote two small native apps with C# and Swift that would load a webview and other duties. App download size and memory consumption was reduced by like 90%. We also moved distribution and updates to the app stores of ea…
Nice. How long did the migration take?
It was trivial to create the apps with a web view. Then we implemented new features integrated with the OS that we didn't have before. This was back in 2018 so my memory is a bit fuzzy but I'd say in total 2-3 weeks of work. We definitely lost more time with Squirrel and Electron than that...
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#165Earlier 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…
I would expect most trouble to come from complicated features like the audio stack or canvas, as well as system integration, not aesthetics.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#166I 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'm curious how Tauri causes different views on different platforms because Tauri frontends are websites and if websites function same way on platforms so should the apps. If websites use something to hide browser differences so should the app developer on Tauri.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know. I'm saying that Tauri doesn't make things more difficult than any normal web app development, it's not like making web apps which work across browsers is a new and scary thing
Tauri does not do this in all cases, as WebkitGTK on Linux has performance issues and is often the ugly duckling of everything. I also feel like I will have to, yet again, trot out the comment from a Slack dev that explains why they moved _from_ per-platform webviews to Chromium. This isn't new ground being charted, plenty of companies and teams have been down this path and Electron exists for a reason. (I am not say…
According to https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-..., Slack never used multiple different per-platform webviews. The earliest version of their desktop app was Mac-only and used the OS-native WebView API, but they switched to Electron at the same time they started work on making the app cross-platform. At the time, not only did Tauri not exist, but neither did the WebView2 API that it uses under the hood on Windows; they would have had to use the WebBrowser ActiveX control, which uses Internet Explorer's Trident engine and was already deprecated. So it's not so much that they rejected per-platform webviews, as that per-platform webviews were not yet really available as an option on desktop.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#168I 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 guess the Web would be all much better if ChromeOS Platform was everything that remained, who needs standards and multiple vendors.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know. I'm saying that Tauri doesn't make things more difficult than any normal web app development, it's not like making web apps which work across browsers is a new and scary thing
It's not a new or scary thing, but it's way more expensive (in time or money) than relying on "it looks good on my machine, so it looks good everywhere." I've worked on large consumer-facing web-apps where we had a dedicated QA team (and/or contracting firm) that runs visual regression testing on multiple platforms and browser versions. As a solo developer, I have no interest in being that team for my hobby project.…
It’s an unpopular take I’m sure, but I really have to question shipping binaries for platforms that I can’t or won’t personally test. Between platform intricacies I don’t understand, unaddressed papercuts, and limited ability to debug issues, the end result is very likely to be underwhelming and/or frustrating for users of that platform, and as such if the app is paid those users are disproportionately unlikely to convert and more likely to churn. The only real benefit I see is an extra platform icon lined up on the marketing page.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#170Earlier 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…
That does not answer the question.
The question is not if Electron feels better for developers because it renders consistently.
The question is if that matters. Is it a big issue? Does any user actually care?