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Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#41

Post by giorgioz »

WolfOliver wrote: post #22
giorgioz wrote: post #20

At https://www.waiterio.com we use plain webviews for Android, iOS and macOS without any framework and Electron for Windows and Linux. The problem with frameworks is that once a year Apple make a change to their signature and it can break the framework for several weeks/months before a fix/hack around is found. By using native webviews you can quickly implement the change needed and get back online in days.

would this work for Windows and Linux too?

Vanilla webviews is definitely possible on Windows with Webview2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ The problem though was compatibility since that webview might be based on old versions of Edge which used to be a much more outdated browser than Safari/Chrome. So far in 5 years of using Electron Windows never broke Electron except on a minor instance. Our Windows Electron app doesn't work on Windows 10 S. The problem might have became fixable by now but Windows S had so little marketshare that we never found time to fix that issue.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#42

Post by elpescado »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #25
awestroke wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is basically using Chrome or Safari nowadays - so WebKit. Very little incompatibilities to consider compared to writing something that works on different WebView implementations

WebKit and Blink have many significant differences, especially when it comes to supporting newer features. In terms of incompatibilities they're about as different as Gecko is from Blink, if not more so.

> as different as Gecko is from Blink

As someone who has been playing with some web dev in early 2000s, that sounds funny. Gecko, WebKit and Blink seem very consistent to me. I remember dealing incompatibilities between IE6 and "standards-compliant" browsers (mainly Firefox/Mozilla Suite back then). And don't get me started on dealing with "classic" Netscape!

`` tag anyone?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#43

Post by lillecarl »

capableweb wrote: post #32
ben-schaaf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebKit and Blink have many significant differences, especially when it comes to supporting newer features. In terms of incompatibilities they're about as different as Gecko is from Blink, if not more so.

Not sure how familiar you are with the history of browser engines, but Blink and WebKit are definitely more similar than Gecko and Blink. Gecko comes from the heritage of Netscape. Blink comes from the chain of KHTML > WebKit WebCore. They don't share any points, while Blink probably wouldn't have existed without WebKit. But yes, today there are differences between WebKit and Blink.

"In terms of incompatibilities they're about as different as Gecko is from Blink, if not more so."

> Not sure how familiar you are with the history of browser engines, but Blink and WebKit are definitely more similar than Gecko and Blink.

I see we interpreted parent poster differently, he wasn't talking about the history of rendering engines, but rather compability with the various web specs. Since Chrome forked WebKit quite a long time ago now and Blink has been reworked quite a bit they have deviated from eachothers implementations. Since everyone is trying to follow an open spec it might be that in certain areas FF and Chrome implement more of the same API's than Safari, which doesn't have anything to do with codebase history.

You might and probably will feel more comfortable in the WebKit codebase if you're a Blink developer or vice versa in comparision to Gecko, but that is if you're writing the engine itself and not pressing the pedals (targeting it).

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#44

Post by wokwokwok »

krapp wrote: post #6
forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #3

If anyone wants to know how it works: > [leverages] WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows and WebKitGTK on Linux. So cross-platform compatibility isn't guaranteed, unlike Electron. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

"cross-platform compatibility" isn't guaranteed on the web either, yet somehow "cross-platform compatible" websites exist. It isn't a problem that's so difficult it requires wrapping a 60Mb runtime around every individual app instance.

I mean… fair, but is the 60MB runtime the issue?

I really don’t care if my hello world UI is 60MB to download, I care that it consumes 1 GB of my precious ram to run.

How is running js with a rust backend any better than running js with a C++ backend?

I guess your “backend” is rust here, which is nice (because I Ie. really, do you get meaningful benefits from using this over say, literally just using https://github.com/webview/webview?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#45

Post by usrusr »

krapp wrote: post #6
forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #3

If anyone wants to know how it works: > [leverages] WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows and WebKitGTK on Linux. So cross-platform compatibility isn't guaranteed, unlike Electron. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

"cross-platform compatibility" isn't guaranteed on the web either, yet somehow "cross-platform compatible" websites exist. It isn't a problem that's so difficult it requires wrapping a 60Mb runtime around every individual app instance.

Yeah, and large fraction of the dev appeal of Electron is that a concern that has haunted web development for a quarter of a century is completely out of the picture when you do Electron. You're not even concerned with possible differences between past, present and future versions of the engine because your code runs with exactly the version you bundled.

Sure, if your app is just a faux-native variant of something that is developed for the browser anyways nothing is lost, but if it's an offline first application that just happens to use web tech for UI the difference is huge.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#47

Post by lillecarl »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #28
simion314 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(no JS, or at least optional) IMO reply At this point why not focus on some actual GUI toolokit, like write a Qt clone in Rust, for real world apps we don't need all the CSS and HTML crap, you need simple layout, GUI components and an option WebView you can embed in the app if needed. Probably there is no commercial interest to pay professional developers with real experience to implement this.

HTML and CSS, while not perfect, are still the best tools I've found to create a pleasant UI. Other libraries like Qt do work , but it's more difficult to get things looking exactly how you want them to look.

This is obviously a different camps kind of thing, but I don't think you're supposed to make everything look exactly pixel perfect to how you want it, you're supposed to follow the look and feel of the OS with native controls and such.

I understand both, I don't agree with either more than the other.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#48

Post by WolfOliver »

jhgb wrote: post #29
WolfOliver wrote: post #7

I'm using electron for https://www.monsterwriter.app/ and i'm looking for a lightweight alternative since a while. This seems to be a good fit. I guess when you can reduce the api calls to bindings (accessing filesystem, network, etc.) cross platform compatibility should not be a problem.

Have you tried Sciter?

I do not really understand the lisence of this. In the repo it says its open source but on the website they ask for money?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#49

Post by jcelerier »

gefhfffh wrote: post #37
Semaphor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, that is not the case. In Germany, FF still has 20% on Desktop and 10% total (and I wonder if those numbers are maybe too low, as FF blocks those trackers by default).

That means that there are about 8 million people using Firefox in Germany. The world has more than 3 billion internet users

I don't understand why this relative metric matters. Past the size of a small city it just shouldn't matter how many more users the competition have. There are more firefox users today (~200M) than there were total internet users in 1998 (~150M), and surely you would agree that it does not make sense to discard that, any more than it makes sense to discard, say, UK or France from diplomatic relationships because they have ~70M inhabitants while India and China account for almost 3 billion.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#50

Post by brnt »

forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #3

If anyone wants to know how it works: > [leverages] WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows and WebKitGTK on Linux. So cross-platform compatibility isn't guaranteed, unlike Electron. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

> WebKitGTK

Is there something like WebkitQt? Guess it would use WebEngine.

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