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

431–440 of 465 posts

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

#431

Post by namuol »

bboygravity wrote: post #313
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…

Counterpoint: if you rewrite a Rust app, ANY Rust app and turn it into a perfectly rewritten Electron app, it will 100 percent still be shittier, bigger, slower and eat more RAM and CPU.

Performance is a feature, I agree. Language choice matters to a degree. Shitty apps can still be written in “fast” languages.

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

#432

Post by charcircuit »

pjmlp wrote: post #360
charcircuit wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>monoculture for the win The browser is the actual product. An open source browser engine lowers the barrier of entry of creating new browsers. >Likewise I guess there is no problem that game developers mainly care about Windows, Proton is open source, so no big deal Which is why Valve recommends game developers to target Windows and use Proton for compatibility. Having one platform to target simplifies developers li…

There will be no browsers left, likewise the Year of Desktop Linux will never come, cursed forever to emulate/translate other platforms, ChromeOS and Windows, so that it can have any kind of applications, pretending to be "native".

What do you mean? Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Brave are all different browsers that share the same browser engine. The year of the Linux Desktop didn't come, but the year of the Linux phone did come with Android becoming the most popular operating system surpassing desktop operating systems.

>pretending to be "native".

The code is native. Just because something uses a library to call platform code it doesn't mean it isn't native. By that logic programs that use qt are not native because they use a cross platform api.

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

#434

Post by Narishma »

anthk wrote: post #233
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.

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.

> Luakit even ran under a netbook. Single page bound, ok,, but not bad from an n270 with 1GB of RAM.

I have one such device and Firefox and Chrome also run on it. They're slow but still usable.

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

#435

Post by Sammi »

pkolaczk wrote: post #386
Sammi wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End users care that they get a product at all. Which they won't if it's too costly to make. There is a balance that is appropriate for each project. Or else we should all be writing machine code by hand.

Rust has been shown by Google to not be any less productive than other mainstream languages though.

[citation_needed]

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

#436

Post by tgma »

codr7 wrote: post #374
tgma wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which models you are using, but in my experience they have been way more than fancy autocomplete today. I have had thousand line programs written and refined with just a few prompts. On the analysis and code review side, they have been even more impressive, finding issues and potential impacts of changes and describing the intent behind the code. I implore you to revisit good models like Gemini 2.5 Pro.…

I generally have to maintain the code I write, often by myself; thousands of lines of uninspired slop code is the last thing I need in my life. Friction is the birth place of evolution.

Some people go to camping now and then to hunt their own food and feel connected to nature and feel that friction. They just won't want it every day. Just like they don't tend to generate the underlying uninspired assembly themselves. FWIW if your premise is the code they generate is necessarily unmaintainable compared to an average CS college graduate human baseline, I'd argue against that premise.

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

#437

Post by igouy »

lelanthran wrote: post #343
kristianp wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

> And a surprising level of speedup. Not surprising at all; I keep pointing out that the language benchmarking game is rarely, if at all, reflective of real-world usage. Any time you point out how slow JS is someone always jumps up with a link to some benchmark showing that it is only 2x slower than Go (or Java, or whatever). The benchmarks game, especially in GC'ed languages, are not at all indicative of real-world…

Perhaps "real-world usage" is "… rarely, if at all, reflective of [other] real-world usage …".

Perhaps when you write "idiomatic usage" you mean un-optimized.

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

#438

Post by KronisLV »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #409
KronisLV wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago, I experimented with Wails and Tauri on Windows. The builds did indeed take unreasonably long with the Rust option and were way faster with Go, no idea why but I ditched Tauri because of that since Wails did more or less the same thing.

Did you manage to publish/ship your WAILS app? What was your biggest hurdle with it?

It was an internal app, a GUI to configure a CLI tool in a user friendly manner. For that use case, I essentially built a local SPA with Vue that can also call some endpoints on server side software that we also host. There, the rendering differences between the web views didn't really matter but the small distribution size was a major boon, plus being able to interface with Go code was really pleasant (as is that whole toolchain). No complaints so far, then again, not a use case where polish would matter that much.

I'd say that the biggest hurdle for that sort of thing is just the documentation or examples of how to do things online - because Electron is the one everyone seems to use and has the most collective knowledge out there.

Post reply on HN