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Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#61

Post by jraph »

wokwokwok wrote: post #44
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.…

One can hope that the code of the engine will be shared across apps in memory, thanks to shared libraries, and that the engine itself will use shared things too, by virtue of being distributed with the OS.

... if you happen to run other browsers and apps using this WebKit / libwebkitgtk / webview.

and that embedded apps won't be obese frontend code with bazillion npm dependencies and a heavy, all too widespread framework, of course.

Hopefully, developers turning to Tauri will have some sensibility to lightness.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#62

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

fiatjaf wrote: post #31

When are we going to get back truly native apps? Flutter Desktop works great, and there are a bunch of nice GUI libraries for Rust, also some new developments for the JRE.

> When are we going to get back truly native apps?

When the browser is the OS - or the other way around.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#63

Post by kaba0 »

krapp wrote: post #51
fiatjaf wrote: post #31

When are we going to get back truly native apps? Flutter Desktop works great, and there are a bunch of nice GUI libraries for Rust, also some new developments for the JRE.

Probably never. The web is becoming, if it hasn't already become, the universal platform for application development and distribution, and javascript the One True programming language. Every holdout will eventually and inevitably be assimilated, either transpiled into javascript or compiled into WebAssembly. And it's partly the fault of the native programming community. It should be as easy to write a native, cross-p…

With all due respect, I think the web’s layouting (or lack of) is the most complicated out of any framework I have ever used (including qt, swing, javafx, winforms, wpf). I think the great majority of web devs would have trouble recreating something like bulma (regarding layouting) even without responsiveness — I definitely would have quite a bit of trouble doing that.

So if anything, we are just accustomed to the web’s way and other (saner) approaches look stranger for some reason (even though with some insane complexity js frameworks come back and mimic the two decade old frameworks here and there)

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#64

Post by simion314 »

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.

CSS has too much old crap, how many ways you can center a thing? How many ways you can horizontal align some stuff? There should be only 1 way and that way should not have hacks like use negative margins.

What a Qt or other similar frameworks gives you is consistency, all components in all apps will look and work the same (with the exception of customized ones). This means you can focus on UX and not on bad design. My experience is that some bad designer will force his opinion on the users, will force his preferred fonts, font sizes and font colors on the users(making text hard to read), will disabgle text selection for some weird reason, will fuck with the scrollbars because the native ones are ugly etc.

For a working app that is not a music player you don't need the "power" of css, say you seen video games have a small Launcher/config window that hase buttons,drop downs, checkboxes , I noticed those use Qt or Windows Forms. I am also noticing that modding tools , open source tools (that are not GNOME) also focus on functionality and you will not see buttons with round corners, fancy fonts and animated borders.

IMO Electron advantage is not his the "powerfull"css and html and it is that you can reuse the existing node ecosystem and existing web developers and the alternatives are also lacking for higher level languages (GTK is shit IMO)

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#65

Post by rebolek »

wokwokwok wrote: post #44
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.…

> I really don’t care if my hello world UI is 60MB to download

lot of people cares, they may have a slow connection, must pay per MB and so on.

There is no reason why hello world UI should be 60MB.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#66

Post by pjmlp »

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

Yes, the lazy devs path, helping Google to spread Chrome everywhere.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#67

Post by mfollert »

IceWreck wrote: post #38

If someone is looking for the Go alternative, there is Wails. https://wails.io/

> Wails automatically makes your Go methods available to Javascript, so you can call them by name from your frontend! It even generates Typescript versions of the structs used by your Go methods, so you can pass the same data structures between Go and Javascript.

That sounds really great!

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#68

Post by pjmlp »

fragmede wrote: post #60
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Chrome is the new IE6, and guarantees cross platform compatibility everywhere it uses its own renderer though. (Basically !iOS.) It's a strong reason for choosing to Electron for your "native" app.

Nice IE reference, helping Google to spread ChromeOS is exactly one reason not to package Electron everywhere, besides the bloat to have multiple copies.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#69

Post by WolfOliver »

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?

I mean MacOS, not Windows

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#70

Post by asimpletune »

krapp wrote: post #51
fiatjaf wrote: post #31

When are we going to get back truly native apps? Flutter Desktop works great, and there are a bunch of nice GUI libraries for Rust, also some new developments for the JRE.

Probably never. The web is becoming, if it hasn't already become, the universal platform for application development and distribution, and javascript the One True programming language. Every holdout will eventually and inevitably be assimilated, either transpiled into javascript or compiled into WebAssembly. And it's partly the fault of the native programming community. It should be as easy to write a native, cross-p…

Can you explain more the part about native apps being hard to make? I mean, I can open Xcode, start a new project, hit run, and there's an app ready to go, with a simulator and everything. It has API's that allow safe access to OS-level resources. It has powerful multi-threading, built-in views that I can reuse (like collections), stack based browsing is native, etc... Also, the client is not broken by default (I.e. client apps in the browser are by default spyware, at a technical level).

All the weird tooling that exists around actually getting html + js + css to work like an app is an indication to the contrary. The constantly evolving ecosystems is an indication of reaching stability, not having yet achieved it.

I will say though that targeting different platforms is an issue, which is not the same thing as your claim. Yes, targeting all platforms is hard, but I don't think any one native app ecosystem is really any harder than web.

I do think there's a lot of survivor bias from people whose job it is to build apps with web technologies.

And to your point that "it won". I don't think anyone, even lay-people, like electron-based apps. It's just what they have to use because there is an infinite amount of web developers. However, I feel that it's a bit premature to call call something that's ubiquitous that everyone hates as "winning".

Also, the most used software as a matter of time on task would probably be excel, email clients, and web browsers. All of these are built natively. So with the exception of slack, and taking a broad view of the road that lies ahead, most of the stuff that's built on electron is sort of vapor in the grand scheme of things.

I think we can actually expect to see more and more native apps, due to power consumption requirements. I stopped using Chrome years ago due to its aggressive power/memory consumption and never actually really looked back.

Any way, sorry for the unnecessarily long response, but seriously what you're saying is very hyperbolic. We are literally just at the beginning of the absolute beginning in terms of what technology is going to look like. Things will be very different in 5 years and super different in 10-20 years.

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