Any effort to get rid of the Electron bloat is great.
Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
421–430 of 465 posts
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#422I'm 100% on board for abandoning Electron as often as possible.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#423Why bundle redis and not another embedded kv store like lmdb?
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I think a lot of people miss about Rust - outside of slow compile times and personal preference, there is no reason not to choose Rust over JavaScript/TypeScript (unless of course you're working in the browser). It does everything JavaScript can do, but it does it faster and with more stability. At the end of the day, these features pay out huge dividends. And this isn't Rust zealotry! I think this…
Rust's type system gymnastics compared to most languages goes quite a bit beyond preference. I can't see the overlap at all with dynamic scripting languages, two completely different tools for completely different problems.
TS has one of the more gymnastics-heavy type systems, IMO, and I think many if not most JS shops use TS.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#425Beware 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…
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Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
It comes back to the nature of the work; I've got a hobby project which is basically an emulator of CP/M, a system from the 70s, and there is a bug in it. My emulator runs BBC Basic, Zork, Turbo Pascal, etc, etc, but when it is used to run a vintage C compiler from the 80s it gives the wrong results. Can an LLM help me identify the source of this bug? No. Can I say "fix it"? No. In the past I said "Write a test-case…
> Can an LLM help me identify the source of this bug? No. Can I say "fix it"? No. In the past I said "Write a test-case for this CP/M BDOS function, in the same style as the existing tests" These are all things I've done successfully with ChatGPT o1 and o3 in a 7.5kloc Rust codebase. I find the key is to include all information which may be necessary to solve the problem in the prompt. That simple.
7.5 kloc is pretty tiny, sounds like you may be able to get the entire thing into the context.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#427I wonder why it wasn't written in Swift. I mean, if you want to make an app targeting a specific platform and willing to invest time into a native language, might as well use the platform's official native language.
Apple only sees developers as a revenue stream to squeeze dry. Investing into Apple-only technologies is getting yourself into an abusive relationship. macOS is still a good platform, but staying away from Swift gives you an escape plan.
There's also no point having a native UI on macOS any more. Apple ruined it themselves by switching to flat design, and making their own UIs and apps an uncanny valley between macOS and iPadOS. There's no distinct native look-and-feel on macOS any more.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the difference between Tauri and Electron. From what I understand both use browser for rendering, except electron ships the whole browser while Tauri use the browser already there on the system.
That's part of it, but also Tauri uses Rust on the backend while Electron uses Node. Electron is way more mature with a larger developer community, but Tauri keeps gaining momentum. If memory safety, bundle size, and performance are important to you, Tauri is a nice choice. Electron is not bad but there's a reason there are so many new players.
The main significant difference, Electron bundles it's own version of Chrome which means you have very few cross platform issues when shipping Mac/Windows/Linux. This trades off a few hundred meg for consistency in rendering.
Tauri uses the OS engine which means Windows uses Edge presumably and Mac uses Safari's Webkit so you're going to have rendering differences and feature differences there.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust's type system gymnastics compared to most languages goes quite a bit beyond preference. I can't see the overlap at all with dynamic scripting languages, two completely different tools for completely different problems.
TS has one of the more gymnastics-heavy type systems, IMO, and I think many if not most JS shops use TS.
TS is gradual though, Rust is all or nothing.
Re: Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Please just let us bundle a modern chrome with our apps. please, no. I wish software companies had to pay the hardware they require for their users, then we would have devs using Rust instead of JS and optimizing using ASM just to save parts of cents per instance. And we wouldn't see companies like MS kill well designed and performed native apps for a electron app
Why are you against the idea of an optional feature that lets them keep using Tauri while maintaining browser parity? You don't have to use it.