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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

161–170 of 438 posts

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're overstating the browser compatibility problem too. It was really bad 15 years ago, but today it is almost a non-issue. Between significantly improved standardization of web technologies, and new tricks like polyfills, I think it has become pretty uncommon for apps to not just work on multiple browsers without any tinkering.

I use Chrome, Safari and Firefox on a Mac. In my experience, unfortunately it isn't true that apps work with very high reliability. This is why I use multiple browsers. I don't want to use Chrome, and I encounter new websites with functionality that don't work properly in Safari or Firefox quite regularly. Some of this is even quite basic functionality. From things like shopping carts where the final payment button d…

This is exactly the problem I was suggesting might be improved by an increase in browser diversity. 9/10 times, the issue isn't the browser itself, the issue is that the dev didn't bother to test and find the (handful of often small and easy to fix) bugs in other browsers. If they were forced to do QA - and ideally, had to adhere better to the actual standards to make their own jobs easier - you might have an easier time using those apps (and the libraries they depend on) in other browsers.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#162
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer shipping executables to MacOS, Windows, and Linux today this is the only assumption I can make. I cannot assume that dependencies exist or are the correct version, I can't assume the user knows that package managers exist or that the dependencies shipped by the package managers are correct, I can't assume anything exists on PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and I can't even assume that libc or libc++ on a syste…

> Meanwhile 16GB of memory Oh if only that was enough. My Safari is currently using 25.33GB¹ and and it regularly goes over 30. > 1TB SSDs cost less than $100 Ah, if only it was that easy. ¹ (According to iStat Menus; it's harder to see in Activity Monitor due to the separate processes.)

you can't buy an M1 mac with more than 16GB of memory so it seems like you have bigger problems

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#163
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Interesting. So according to @baxrob, Tauri took over control of https://github.com/webview/webview project for the past year. And now I'm told they are moving away from it.

I'm left wondering why take over a project if they're going to ditch it. For lack of a better term.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#164

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)

They’re putting a lot of resources behind and it actually is thriving. They have a real financial interest as there’s pretty thorough firebase support. It’s also reviving their Dart language.

As someone that’s using it, it is improving very quickly. Web support is getting quite good.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we know from web statistics that these are very few people and shrinking every year.

That is not how it works on Windows, as you have to ship either the Webview2 runtime or installer with your app - otherwise you’re stuck with the old rendering engines. At which point, it’s just easier to ship Electron.

Shipping Electron and bundling the WebView2 runtime are practically the same level of difficulty.

Making an installer is not that hard, and you should have enough respect for your users' compute resources to go through the modicum of effort it takes.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I supposed you're being sarcastic. The realistic version of this is that we have experience and evidence that tells us that it has the potential to be more performant.

So does the assembly version I just started work on.

Are you disagreeing that Rust makes it easier to write performant software?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#167

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…

What we need is a subset of HTML features that are known to work across all major browser. From Firefox, Safari /WebKit on other MacOS, and Chrome.

Or something that compiles to the compatible HTML code for those platform with 100% accuracy.

Unless that happens, you are dealing with godzillion number of edge cases in hundreds of different System Browser.

But even if such language or subset of feature exist, it will still not be as good or as be limited compared what is possible on top of current Electron. Which means from a user perspective, the Dev is optimising for something they rarely cares about; download size. Given memory CPU and Memory usage to electron.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#168
Why doesn't Electron debundle itself into the Runtime vs Application? Much like .Net Runtime. Electron can then be installed in a single spot in the system and all Electron apps pick it up from that spot. You can install bundle the Electron Runtime in the installer (200mb installer is no biggie for a desktop app) but you get all the benefits of consolidating RAM usage across.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#169
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I mean by executable code. But that is only really minor (<100MB or so) compared to the remaining resource usage.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#170

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…

any idea when windows webview will switch over to Chromium?
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