Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

desktopdocs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 465 posts

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

#281

Post by platevoltage »

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…

The documentation for Tauri V2 was straight up trash when I last used it about 6 months ago. The project is very promising, but it was a huge pain getting some things to work with nothing to reference.

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

#282

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

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…

Is it hard to ship a Rust library with Electron? At least then it's not all C++

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

#283

Post by kristianp »

GarettWithOneR wrote: post #244
gozzoo wrote: post #77

Isn't such app best implmented with some cross platform framework like flutter? It has support for all major desktop OSes and at leqast the examples run very smooth.

I evaluated Flutter for my app before deciding to go with Tauri and wrote about it on my blog: https://arboretum.space/blog/why-arboretum-chose-tauri . The short version is that Flutter's lack of rich text editing solutions at the time made it a non-starter. It's a common problem in the Flutter ecosystem from what I've seen, there's often 0 or only 1 quality package for many "advanced" desktop use cases.

> many "advanced" desktop use cases

I've found that the GUI library I tried (fyne with go) was mobile-first, so some desktop things e.g. file-open dialogs didn't have the functionality I expected (the "dialog" was actually drawn within the same window as the application window). Flutter is mobile first too IIUC.

Outside of Qt, languages like rust and go don't have a good solid desktop GUI development option.

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

#284

Post by capyba »

I’ve been trying to build a desktop app in Rust+egui but as a Rust newbie (and desktop app newbie in general) I’ve found it really difficult to learn so many concepts at once. My work centers around mechanical engineering analysis tools which require high perf backend and data visualization on the front end. With Tauri did you find it difficult to maintain multiple stacks (rust, js, html, etc)?

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

#285

Post by factual »

sturges wrote: post #128

I write a lot of small internal tools to enable my team to work more efficiently. I've traditionally used WinForms, but recently tried using WinUI3. Disaster. Not even close to ready. After that, switched to just using React, uploading to an Azure static site, and adding Tauri if someone really wants an executable. Finding what you're finding--Tauri gets you most of the way there and comes with a much smaller file si…

[dead]

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

#286

Post by FINDarkside »

taroth wrote: post #215
sillyboi wrote: post #142

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…

Here's a great comparison, updated two weeks ago. https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... Electron comes out looking competitive at runtime! IMO people over-fixate on disc space instead of runtime memory usage. Memory Usage with a single window open (Release builds) Windows (x64): 1. Electron: ≈93MB 2. NodeGui: ≈116MB 3. NW.JS: ≈131MB 4. Tauri: ≈154MB 5. Wails: ≈163MB 6. Neutralino: ≈282MB Mac…

The benchmark also says Tauri takes 25s to launch on Linux and build of empty app takes over 4 minutes on Windows. Not sure if those numbers are really correct.

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

#287

Post by wizzledonker »

dotancohen wrote: post #248
apitman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your motivations for porting in the first place?

There are two specific places where Python is not performant. I ran some tests in a few languages and Rust and C++ came out on top, by far. I could write Rust components and access them via Python. I could also use C++ and stick with Qt. Or I could take the plunge with Rust. As this is a personal app with no other users, this is a good place to keep sharpening my skills.

Then I’d say just pick the one you are most familiar with

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

#289

Post by schappim »

+1 for using Tauri over Electron. I've been using it for my MCP marketplace and management app[1], and it's been excellent. Having previously used only Electron, I was surprised by how much smaller the binaries are. Performance also feels noticeably faster.

The only challenge was my lack of familiarity with Rust. Even if you're starting off with a "JS first app", Tauri often requires dropping into Rust for anything even slightly native, such as file system access (eg. managing config files for Claude, Witsy, or code editors), handling client lifecycle actions like opening, closing, and restarting, or installing local MCP servers.

1. https://ninja.ai

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

#290

Post by pradn »

CommonGuy wrote: post #90
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…

We are using system webviews for https://kreya.app (not Tauri, but a custom implementation) and the platform differences are seldom a problem... Polyfills fix most of the things and we are running automated end to end test on Linux, which catches most of the issues. IMO the most difficult thing is figuring out how far the users are behind with their webview version, mostly on Linux and macOS. Windows has done thinga…

Wait - there's system webviews? On Mac, Windows, and Linux?

Edit: It looks like Tauri uses the following platform webview features.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry?tab=readme-ov-file#platfor...

Post reply on HN