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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

#191

Post by correa_brian »

aavshr wrote: post #173

Great work, I can imagine how interesting the migration went. Why are you using Redis if I may ask? Was something like sqlite not enough? What are your biggest challenges with Tauri? I also work with an Electron app and we also do local embeddings and most of the CPU intensive work happens in nodejs addons written in Rust and using Neon ( https://neon-rs.dev very grateful for this lib). This is a nice balance for us.

Thanks! We went with Rust because we weren't able to tune sqlite with a vector search extension to give me the results we wanted. I'm sure it's possible to use it instead of Redis but that's an optimization for another day. I'll check out Neon.

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

#193

Post by correa_brian »

twen_ty wrote: post #171
whatevermom wrote: post #130

Why embed Redis ? What feature do you need from Redis so bad that you need to embed it? Maybe you could just use Rust and have something performant without adding complexity?

Or alternatively, why would SQLite be not as performant as Redis in embedded context?

I just wasn't able to get the similarity results to match redis. Probably my own error, but that's why I opted for it instead of SQLite. We'll revisit at some point.

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

#194

Post by correa_brian »

mac-mc wrote: post #146

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?

The UX was a small part of the re-write. Since we started from scratch we had a blank slate and figured we'd go all in on Tauri/Rust/React vs. trying continue with Electron in the mix.

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

#195

Post by platevoltage »

correa_brian wrote: post #187
platevoltage wrote: post #186

I did the same thing with one of my projects. I built a simple webcam viewer that is optimized for USB microscopes as I couldn't find anything out there for this purpose. Basically all of the functionality was implemented in the renderer. As I was planning for App Store submission, I realized that a 500mb webcam viewer might not be the best thing. I decided to port it to Tauri V2 and got it down to about 15mb.

That's pretty sick. Nice work. What's it called? We're working on the app store submission this week.

I ended up calling it Microscopic View. I made a webpage for it and everything.

https://microscopic-view.jgarrettcorbin.com

I got tied up with other projects while I was trying to navigate the submission process (it was my first time), so it's not up yet, but I'd be happy send you a build if you want to check it out.

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

#196

Post by correa_brian »

joshterrill wrote: post #144

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.

We're using redis vector modules for cosine similarity. I'm sure there's more to optimize there. Your project sounds cool. How'd you reverse engineer apple's model?

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

#198

Post by porridgeraisin »

oblio wrote: post #136
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.

But the thing is, if you're using Tauri, you control the web app. So you need to test it on WebkitGTK, I guess that's the extra burden?

Have you actually tried deploying to webkitgtk ever?

Good luck "testing" your video conferencing app on webkitgtk - it doesn't support webrtc! It is still useful to test your error page I suppose.

Note that this is one example among many of missing features, bugs and/or horrible performance.

Here's a preview: no notifications, no :has, no TLA.

(Not blaming the epiphany devs for the situation here to be clear)

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

#199

Post by iknowstuff »

zerr wrote: post #151
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.

wxWidgets or QtWidgets if you want a proper desktop GUI app.

that's funny, most of the time I don't even want to USE apps written in those because they're dated and janky as hell, must less write in them

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

#200

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

_bent wrote: post #118
tonyhart7 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

lol when you click through to this site from HN it redirects to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fa...

if you open in new tab or copy/paste in new tab it does not.

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