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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

#401

Post by mekkkkkk »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #332
encom wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

My god... a 200+ MB install footprint, 200+ MB of RAM usage, requires a beefy GPU just to render its window. How did we get here?

I might be crazy, but for me it's faster and more convenient to download and run Etcher than to read up on dd command arguments and device paths. Storage space is plentiful for me. RAM isn't an issue as it's only run once in a blue moon.

Is it crazy bloated and resource hungry for what it does? Undeniably! Does it matter? Not for me.

Electron resource use can be painful for apps that are running constantly, like Discord, VSCode and Slack. For utilities like Etcher, who cares.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#402

Post by krzyk »

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…

> What value does electron add to the user? I would argue none. That Slack can’t find the resources to write actual Swift for a Mac App is just amazing to me. Instead we are essentially interacting with a lowest-common-denominator web app. Is a chat app that hard to write natively? We’d get better performance, a smaller footprint, and a more polished, platform-specific product.

Exactly, one can look at Telegram app, it is clean, polished and open source client written as a native app that works across many platforms (and one of few that has Linux client).

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#403

Post by krzyk »

nicoburns wrote: post #322
briandear wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Instead of writing platform specific apps You've answered your own question as to why people write then. > What value does electron add to the user? It adds a lot of value to Linux and to a lesser extent Mac users: before a electron a lot of apps didn't have a version for these platform at all.

> It adds a lot of value to Linux and to a lesser extent Mac users: before a electron a lot of apps didn't have a version for these platform at all.

I prefer web versions of those apps on Linux than electron. Sorry, I want to run just one browser and it is not Chrome based one.

And for sure Electron apps don't allow that ease of cross platform development as one thinks, I would argue that it is on the same level as a native app with good abstraction library (see Telegram client source on github).

It is more that they don't want to hire desktop developers (or just ones that want to learn something else than JS).

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#404

Post by krzyk »

simonh wrote: post #284
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app The point is that its effectively a web app. > What value does electron add to the user? They have a desktop app faster than if it was being built natively.

Or at all, how many Electron apps would bother with native Linux clients for example. Some maybe but certainly not all and probably not most either.

Electron app is not a native Linux client, it is just a browser app. If you ran that app in a tab it gives you much better performance and less memory used.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#405

Post by krzyk »

brodock wrote: post #350
dmitrybrant wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god... a 200+ MB install footprint, 200+ MB of RAM usage, requires a beefy GPU just to render its window. How did we get here?

I think we got there also by desperation of lacking good cross-platform GUI toolkits. The current state is, you either use something that looks like Windows 95 in all platforms, or web app. What the web made possible is to anyone to create a decent custom UI with little effort. I still remember how messed up was to create a custom component for Java Swing, which I believe is still one of the easiest to do. How would…

Take a look at Telegram client, looks great on Linux, not sure how it looks on macos or Windows.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#406

Post by cdmoyer »

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…

Honestly, this site is the only place I really hear about the supposed horror of electron. The resource issue doesn't seem to effect me or people in the 7 slacks I'm in all day.

My 6 year old MacBook runs slack, Xcode, android studio, safari, chrome, messages, vs code, vim, iterm2, preview, battle.net and hearthstone all the time without issue, really.

I think for the average user, they'd rather have more features across platforms more quickly than a smaller resident memory footprint and install size.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#407

Post by c-smile »

jokoon wrote: post #370
c-smile wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"is this impossible?" Possible, see Sciter.JS : https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk 10 times more compact than Tauri, 20 times less than Electron.JS Yet it has Rust API ( https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter ), that if someone need "Made with Rust" label :) And it works even on Windows 2000, do you remember that thing? See: https://sciter.com/necromancing-sciter-on-windows-2000/

Can it play videos?

Yes. Check https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/vi...

But Sciter do not have codecs embedded. Instead

a. it [re-]uses streaming services of underlying OS;

b. has interface for the hosting application to supply its own video streams.

This way some applications use WebRTC as video sources, some use ffmpeg library to provide video streams. Video playback architecture is app dependent usually. Sciter provides to them "video rendering site".

That's idea of Sciter - to reuse underlying OS services as much as possible.

For example Sciter has spellchecking but only if OS provides spellchecking API (and usually they do).

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#408

Post by GuB-42 »

cjohansson wrote: post #259
briandear wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Maybe not banned but they could do a carbon tax like they do with motor vehicles. Or maybe like with appliances where you have an energy rating, with stickers telling you how much electricity it will use per year, possibly with tax incentives to pick the most efficient.

Problem is: how to test that? Even with the most straightforward tests, there are cheaters. Appliances have a special "eco" mode to meet the specs that most people won't use because it barely does the job. And for cars, well, VW have shown us how far companies are ready to go.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#410

Post by [deleted] »

innocenat wrote: post #336
saagarjha wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cared about performance, would you really be using Electron?

Yes. Why not? HTML/CSS great (from the development POV) for UI, and I can always write the performance critical code in C and linked them to the electron HTML/CSS frontend.

[deleted]
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