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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#151

Post by joshuacc »

MattGaiser wrote: post #112
vulcan01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet Is this really different from the current state of web development? Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. For apps that are basically installable websites (like Slack, which has a perfectly functional webapp) this doesn't seem…

> Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. Do many companies actually do this though? I've only ever been with companies that test against Chrome. The one time at FF bug was found, that company told that client to switch to Chrome. I know there was a kerfuffle about Airbnb and Groupon only doing Chrome as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBnB/comments/dv7v6n/customer_sup...…

Yes, absolutely. Every company that I've ever worked at had a list of officially supported browsers that included Chrome, FireFox, Safari and Edge/IE. QA engineers would make sure to rotate through various browsers while testing, and for crucial features would run through every scenario in every supported browser's oldest and newest supported versions.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#152

Post by millstone »

vulcan01 wrote: post #13
twarge wrote: post #7

Downloaded the demo app for macOS; feels like an alien UI even though effort was clearly made to use system widgets. On the positive side, the app is only 4 MB and consumes 50 MB at runtime, so at least they've succeeded in that important aspect.

If I'm not mistaken, this is just because the CSS styling isn't that good, right? Take Slack (which uses Electron) as an example: it looks almost the same on Windows and Mac, but it looks good — because the styling (through CSS) is good.

You're talking about how the app looks, but GP was talking about how the app feels.

Slack looks nice but feels quite broken. For example, its non native context menus are beautiful, but do not dismiss properly, do not support single-click selection, do not support spacebar to pick, do not support type-select...

When I use Slack I am constantly frustrated that things don't work the way my other Mac apps work.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#153

Post by chrismorgan »

smasher164 wrote: post #33
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tauri doesn't and instead relies on webview, which uses a different browser engine dependent on your platform, with all the incompatibilities that come with it. Isn't windows system webview now a chromium fork? This should make incompatibility on the major platforms now much less of an issue.

People act as if they haven’t dealt browser incompatibilities in the past. Just feature-detect/polyfill and move on.

That works for many scripting capabilities, but there’s plenty you can’t polyfill. If you’re stuck with the old MSHTML-based web view (which you will be on all but very recent Windows 10 and even sometimes there), there are various CSS Grid features that you can’t polyfill, and you’ll have a number of weird and annoying SVG sizing and styling issues quite apart from any potential missing features, and a bunch of other things like that—even if you polyfill everything in reach (which, even where possible, may perform terribly).

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#154

Post by OJFord »

Huh, funny seeing this here, started using it just a week or so ago, really like it so far.

I'm writing my frontend in JavaScript with Svelte, and able to make impressively smooth RPCs to the Rust backend with Tauri's API. Really nice work.

Edit: actually that's something quite important to add perhaps that the headline doesn't make completely clear - it's not merely 'written in' Rust, but like Electron gives you Rust (resp. Node) to use.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#155

Post by OskarS »

albertzeyer wrote: post #102
the_duke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

But why would the system webview be less resource hungry? If it runs in an own process instance, the only memory you safe is (maybe) the executable code (i.e. maybe 100MB max). Or you would need some common runtime which is shared across the OS, and somehow use IPC to it. Then you can potentially save some more memory. But I don't think this exists. And I'm also not sure how much you really would save. The advantage…

Dynamically loaded system libraries use shared memory. You can load it once for the entire system.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#156

Post by nix0n »

the_duke wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> WebView2 has to be installed separately

Many Windows installers package one or more Visual Studio Redistributable packages into the installer. Is that not possible for these installers?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#157

Post by abeltensor »

dsizzle wrote: post #22
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

Revery is another similar project that is trying to be a lightweight alternative to Electron https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

No revery is native. It doesn't use a webview at all; just uses the skia engine; basically a flutter competitor.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#158

Post by chgibb »

ducktective wrote: post #119
munificent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? That's basically the history of Flutter. The initial goal was something like "Web: The Good Parts" and the results of that experiment led them to where they are now.

I mean, where are they now? Promising or DoA? I fear touching it because of it being a Google project (killedbygoogle.com)

We're pretty bought into Flutter. No cross platform toolkit is perfect but Flutter is miles ahead of everything else. For a not very scientific analysis: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#160

Post by abeltensor »

hu3 wrote: post #20
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

> I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. Perhaps a similar approach to https://github.com/webview/webview ? "Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++/Golang. Uses WebKit (Gtk/Cocoa) and Edge (Windows)"

tauri does use webview but its moving away from it in favor of a rust native solution called WRY.
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