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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

#251

Post by saagarjha »

ahepp wrote: post #232
babypuncher wrote: post #113

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.

"almost a non-issue" doesn't sound very convincing to me. As someone who doesn't write GUIs often, I just don't want to have to worry about it at all. What's the cost of electron over webviews? 100mb hdd space? On the other side of the trade, never having to worry about cross platform concerns again? Not having to support or test on multiple platforms? Seems like a no brainer to me. But it's entirely possible, even l…

> I just don't want to have to worry about it at all

And in doing so you're prioritizing your needs over all of your users'. I think it's fair to claim that a minor convenience to you, at the cost of inconvenience to all your users, might be something you may want to deal with.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#252

Post by Const-me »

eivarv wrote: post #237
Const-me wrote: post #199

If someone paid me to do something similar, I would probably be building on top of this: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac There’re two hard problems there. One is how to render vector graphics and fonts. So far, only web browsers do that in a cross-platform way. Windows has it’s Direct2D and DirectWrite, while Linux has nothing comparable, unfortunately. Another higher level one is how to build easy to use GUI libra…

Why not just wrap/abstract the native platform APIs (like what wxWidgets does)?

These native platform APIs don’t use GPU much, or at all. That’s true even on Windows where GPU support is better than anywhere else. wxWidgets wraps Win32 stuff, it does not use WPF (backed by DirectX 9.0c) nor UWP (backed by Direct3D 11+, Direct2D, and DirectWrite).

Count of pixels in displays was improving way faster than RAM bandwidth or CPU performance. Currently, this does not matter much on desktops, matters somewhat on laptops, and critically important for many mobile and embedded platforms.

When you want to render anything at all at native display resolution and refresh rate, GPU stuff is the only option that works well enough.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#253

Post by saagarjha »

jlokier wrote: post #197
babypuncher wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is more a problem with developers working in Chrome and using Blink-specific features. I stopped having compatibility issues with my apps when I moved to Firefox years ago.

Some of it is Blink-specific, but some of it is silly Javascript stuff. How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working. I like development in Firefox too. When I was doing it intensively (just ~2 years ago), I found some of the CSS I was using behaved differently between Gecko, WebKit and Blink, though (and differently again in Android's pre-chrome browser), so I reconfirmed that I do need t…

> How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working.

Given the megabytes of JavaScript on many websites, the chances that some of it depends on some random VM internal quirk is quite high.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#254

Post by nklayman »

Klonoar wrote: post #127
moron4hire wrote: post #103

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.

Tauri's Bundler will automatically take care of shipping the Webview2 runtime, so there won't be any extra work required of you.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#255

Post by encom »

briandear wrote: post #227
morpheuskafka wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine for someone who already keeps current with front-end stuff, but someone who is a desktop app developer is more likely to just go native than try to make a desktop app that tracks 3+ browser engines of wildly varying versions (luckily 7 is out of support now, but it still might be desired to support for some desktop apps in which case now you have IE to deal with). Electron gives the promise of total code…

> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…

Electron exists because there's a horde of developers whose only tool is a JavaScript hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. That's how you end up rewriting `dd` for Chrome[π].

π: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#256

Post by encom »

908B64B197 wrote: post #110
mumblemumble wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some corporations did that. Most didn't. The main reason IE dominated was that most people didn't care, and stuck with the default. The main reason old versions of browsers were more common than new ones was that self-updating browsers hadn't become a thing yet, and most people didn't care, and just stuck with the default. The reason most browsers stay up-to-date now is that modern browsers are all configured to self…

> I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default I'm not aware of any Windows machines shipping with Chrome pre-installed. But as soon as you use any website that's owned by Google you get spammed with install links for Chrome.

I remember there was a long period where everything would bundle Chrome. One wrong checkbox and your computer would be infested. Adobe Reader was one prominent example.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#257

Post by ZeroCool2u »

yannoninator wrote: post #196

I think the desktop seriously needs a production, RAM and developer friendly breakthrough that isn't Electron. Tauri may be it, but the desktop SO needs this moment, I don't want to see 50 years on and Electron is still being used.

I'm really hoping Flutter or Kotlin Desktop have a breakthrough here soon. Personally, I'm rooting for Flutter, but I'll take what I can get.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#258

Post by nklayman »

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.

The demo app has very basic styling, it isn't designed to be pretty. Since a Webview with HTML/CSS/JS is used for the GUI, you can style your app however you want.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#259

Post by cjohansson »

briandear wrote: post #227
morpheuskafka wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine for someone who already keeps current with front-end stuff, but someone who is a desktop app developer is more likely to just go native than try to make a desktop app that tracks 3+ browser engines of wildly varying versions (luckily 7 is out of support now, but it still might be desired to support for some desktop apps in which case now you have IE to deal with). Electron gives the promise of total code…

> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…

Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#260

Post by encom »

jlokier wrote: post #109
brundolf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks > Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix I say this as a front-end web app dev who would most likely be affected by this kind of shift: it might be slightly less convenient, but I wholeheartedly think it's worth doing, on several levels. People built web apps 15 years ago in the dumpster-fire that was web stand…

I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites. On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome.…

One major benefit of running webapps in an actual browser like Firefox, instead of Electron, is that I can have uBlock and a handful of other defensive plugins, to prevent shady things happening behind my back.
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