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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

#291

Post by katrinarodri »

ebrynne wrote: post #280

I love the idea of wha this app is doing, and so many of the options in this space are laggy and painful, so I'm very interested in this rewrite. That said, as a photographer a lot of my media is stored as RAWs, and it's not clear whether that's supported (or perhaps its exclusion from the list of "all major image and video formats" suggests that it's not)? Does your product have docs/a support forum/other place thes…

RAW files aren't supported yet, but we plan on including them. We're also working on a support page, I'll share that here when it's out.

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

#292

Post by katrinarodri »

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.

Having rich UI library was important for us too. We went with Tauri because we wanted access to web UI libraries.

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

#293

Post by bschwindHN »

satvikpendem wrote: post #214
correa_brian wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dont like the sound of reimplementing the whole UI components....

You don't have to reimplement them yourself, they already come provided with the same components as on the web, like buttons, forms etc (and there are also custom UI frameworks like forui which clones shadcn/UI if you're familiar with that). The point being, Flutter apps can run much smoother precisely because they reimplement everything rather than dealing with the legacies of HTML and CSS. Since your UI seems fairl…

> Flutter apps can run much smoother precisely because they reimplement everything rather than dealing with the legacies of HTML and CSS

Maybe in some cases, but I kind of doubt this statement in general. I just tried a Flutter demo from their official site and text selection doesn't even _work_ correctly.

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/simplistic_editor/

I'll copy-paste a few lines of the example sentence, double click on one of the middle lines to start selecting by word (which it doesn't seem to even do), and then highlighting starts on the top line instead of the line I selected.

In general the flutter apps always feel janky and second-class to the platform they're on, because they never fully implement the exact behavior of each platform they run on.

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

#295

Post by southp »

What an amazing achievement. From the outcome, it sounds like all the hardwork has paid off. Congratulations :)

How have the users perceived the new version so far? Are there positive feedback? Any new complaints due to the parity issues? Or in general, how is your team measuring success of the UI? From the post, it sounds like the users have a way to provide feedback and your team has a way to engage with them, which is wonderful. So I'm curious to learn.

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

#296

Post by StewardMcOy »

amendegree wrote: post #92
correa_brian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for checking it out. The goal is for Desktop Docs to be cross-platform. We've had a lot of requests for Windows support, so we chose Rust to set us up for an upcoming Windows version.

I know it’s probably still not ready for prime time, but I believe the arc browser team was building a windows runtime for swift bec they prefer to use swift everywhere.

I checked it out a while back. It still requires you to write two different UIs in two different frameworks: SwiftUI or Appkit on Mac, and WinUI on Windows. It's just that now you can write WinUI code in Swift instead of C#.

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

#297

Post by namuol »

Beware the greenfield effect.

I don’t want to comment on the technology choices specifically here, but in general the whole “we rewrote our app in X and now it’s better” is essentially a fact of life no matter the tech choices, at least for the first big rewrite.

First, you’re going to make better technical choices overall. You know much better where the problems lie.

Second, you’re rarely going to want to port over every bit of technical debt, bugs, or clunky UX decisions (with some exceptions [1]), so those things get fixed out of the gate.

Finally, it’s simply invigorating to start from a (relatively) clean slate, so that added energy is going to feel good and leave you in a sort of freshly-mowed greenfield afterglow. This in turn will motivate you and improve your work.

The greenfield effect happens even on smaller scales, especially when trying out a new language or framework, since you’re usually starting some new project with it.

[1] A good example of the sort of rewrite that _does_ offer something like an apples-to-apples comparison is Microsoft’s rewrite of the TypeScript compiler (and type checker, and LSP implementation) from TypeScript to Go, since they are aiming for 1-to-1 compatibility, including bugs and quirks: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go

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

#298

Post by janderson215 »

namuol wrote: post #297

Beware the greenfield effect. I don’t want to comment on the technology choices specifically here, but in general the whole “we rewrote our app in X and now it’s better” is essentially a fact of life no matter the tech choices, at least for the first big rewrite. First, you’re going to make better technical choices overall. You know much better where the problems lie. Second, you’re rarely going to want to port over…

This is a good take, so thank you for sharing. Can you please rewrite it in Go?

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

#299

Post by kristianp »

namuol wrote: post #297

Beware the greenfield effect. I don’t want to comment on the technology choices specifically here, but in general the whole “we rewrote our app in X and now it’s better” is essentially a fact of life no matter the tech choices, at least for the first big rewrite. First, you’re going to make better technical choices overall. You know much better where the problems lie. Second, you’re rarely going to want to port over…

Microsoft rewriting typescript tools in Go and getting a 10x speedup? It's wild that they would choose Go for that. And a surprising level of speedup.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...

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

#300

Post by ameliaquining »

CreepGin wrote: post #262
ameliaquining wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, we use Electron specifically because it gives us a locked-down version of Chromium with a consistent WebGPU implementation. Without that, we're stuck dealing with whatever browser version the user happens to have, and that completely wrecks the stability of our GPU pipeline.

Okay, fair, none of the apps I had in mind make much use of WebGPU and it stands to reason that browser diversity might be a bigger problem with a very complicated and relatively less mature API like that one.
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