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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

#231

Post by cosmic_cheese »

wtallis wrote: post #212
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

There's also the simple fact that shipping an identical UI on multiple operating systems is obviously wrong for a least some of those operating systems (and maybe all of them). You don't have to worry about "platform intricacies" because a web-based cross-platform UI toolkit is going to get really basic UI conventions wrong.

It’s not only UI design/conventions being covered, but also things like quirks with the system’s audio, compositor, window manager, etc depending on what your app does and which technologies it uses. If the dev doesn’t understand these things about a platform, they’re walking into a minefield by supporting it.

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

#232

Post by anthk »

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.

Gnome Web sucks, it's has shitty defaults and a horrid performance. But luakit/vimb can be really fast. Luakit even ran under a netbook. Single page bound, ok,, but not bad from an n270 with 1GB of RAM.

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

#233

Post by anthk »

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.

Gnome Web sucks, it has shitty defaults and a horrid performance. But luakit/vimb can be really fast. Luakit even ran under a netbook. Single page bound, ok,, but not bad from an n270 with 1GB of RAM.

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

#234

Post by anthk »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #198
oblio wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Ahem https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/8426

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

#235

Post by dontlaugh »

echelon wrote: post #190
katrinarodri wrote: post #35

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…

> 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. This is our #1 frustration with Tauri. The OS-provided system webviews are not stable, repeatable, consistent platforms to build upon. Tauri decided that a key selling point of their platform was that Tauri builds won't bundle a browse…

Why even bother with a browser runtime? It sounds like you have intricate UI needs, so you need a proper UI library. Several options exist.

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

#236

Post by anthk »

the__alchemist wrote: post #55
tcshit wrote: post #30

As a C++ developer I shrug at those size numbers, but I’m glad you are a happy with Rust.

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.

Strip the Linux binaries with strip(1).

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

#237

Post by dang »

amelius wrote: post #162

[flagged]

This comment breaks both the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

Could you please review the rules and stick to them? We'd appreciate it because we're trying for something quite different here.

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

#238

Post by rs186 »

yojo wrote: 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…

> Have you run into any cross platform UI bugs

Of course not, it's only for Mac. If they were to support Windows and Linux, they probably would not have published this post.

Cross-platform UI is hard, even harder if you want to keep almost the exact same UI, same feature set across platforms, and potentially an online version. People moved from native applications to Qt to web stack for a reason.

Saying this as someone who works at a company that develops cross-platform desktop application that has millions of users. I can't imagine what my job would be like if we were using any other solution.

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

#239

Post by apitman »

dotancohen wrote: post #224

How did you settle on Tauri, as opposed to e.g. egui? Is it because of the experience with Electron? I'm dragging my feet about porting my Python Qt app to Rust, because I feel that no Rust GUI library is as rich as Qt and I know that I'll get stuck with that at some point.

What are your motivations for porting in the first place?

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

#240

Post by zdrummond »

correa_brian wrote: post #132
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?

Their vector search modules are the reason I embedded it. I tried sqlite and wasn't getting good search results with the vss extension. Maybe I wasn't configuring it correctly. Redis was just better than the alternatives (qdrant, sqlite, duckdb with vector search).

I would love to understand this in more depth. Any chance you could write up what you found?
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