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Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#81

Post by ss108 »

danuker wrote: post #74

Why do people use such a tool? I did not enjoy Electron due to its sluggishness, and I believe that it is a strictly Pareto-inferior solution: * Creating a web app has the same UI performance, but does not require you to download and update. * Creating a native app has the same installation and update requirements, but allows much better UI performance.

Because some of us have to build things which, for biz/customer reasons, have to be desktop apps, but we, as devs, are more familiar with web technologies/there are more web libs out there.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#82

Post by Aeolun »

yayr wrote: post #75

Is there still an easy way to use node.js with Tauri? I'd appreciate an easy to use cross-platform tool on the backend. Or is it better to build the backend features needed (e.g. file access, config management, network etc.) fully in rust?

If you do that, wouldn’t it be NW.js?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#83

Post by fabiospampinato »

pjmlp wrote: post #66
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.

Arguably that's like observing that the same feature works differently in 2+ browsers and blaming web devs for it. It's the job of the browser people to make correct, or at least consistent, platforms.

While part of being a web dev unfortunately is also dealing with this you can't necessarily blame web devs when Safari breaks IndexedDB for the nth time, or when after using ES2018 features like regex lookarounds you discover that Safari still hasn't implemented them (which year are we in now, 2022?).

You may also discover that mobile and desktop browsers work differently in some aspects, not everybody even has the resources to test every single thing in 3+ desktop browsers (which may require at least 1 VM already if you are not developing on macOS, which I think might even be illegal to run in a non-mac hardware, bizarrely) and 3+ mobile browsers (which may require at least one physical device or a macOS VM for the iPhone, and another physical device or another VM for Android, and all these VMs aren't exactly lightweight).

Besides an Electron app doesn't necessarily have to run anywhere else, there's no point in checking compatibility with Gecko when your app never has to run there.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#84

Post by niyaven »

YPPH wrote: post #77
pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does the Chrome engine, embedded within Electron, contain any Chrome features which one could legitimately call into question (such as sync)? If not, what's wrong with it "spread[ing]" everywhere? It's hardly lazy dev work. It's a pragmatic approach to developing cross platform apps quickly. Apps that, it might be added, don't have a horrendous UI, which is common with other frameworks.

> If not, what's wrong with it "spread[ing]" everywhere?

Because then it's a monopoly. I'm taking shortcuts but having a single browser engine controlled by a single company means that you rely on that company to define what is tomorrow's web like.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#85

Post by fabiospampinato »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #71
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

I guess but compatibility issues on the web, while they existe, are pretty discrete these days. Browser monoculture is exceedingly worse, both practically and from a business perspective, in my opinion.

I don't know about that, one data point: an ES2018 feature, regex lookarounds, is still not implemented in Safari. And the JS engine is the thing that's the most compatible across browsers, nowhere near the level of incompatibility of the rendering engine for example.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#86

Post by nisegami »

WolfOliver wrote: post #48
jhgb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As I understand, stuff like this is typically called "source available" rather than "open source".

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#87

Post by fiatjaf »

kaba0 wrote: post #63
krapp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

I agree with that. Doing layouts with HTML and CSS is too open, flexible, which means you have to do everything yourself from scratch every single time.

Another thing you have to do from scratch is the eye candy aspect of every webapp. I guess the web is more flexible in the sense that you can do anything you want UI-wise, but honestly, how much time and work and money is spent on making pretty webapps? How much more productive our society would be if the useful tools were just tools and not masterpieces of design?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#88

Post by fiatjaf »

asimpletune wrote: post #70
krapp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I agree.

Writing native apps is very easy once you get mildly used to any framework for writing native apps.

The "web" is just another framework, a very popular one, but also one that is very bloated and hard-to-use.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#89

Post by fiatjaf »

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…

Has the web won on mobile? No. In fact there was a time in which Cordova-like apps were getting very popular, but react-native and then Flutter, Kotlin and Swift have ended that. Or at least that's my impression. react-native is almost like the web still though, but the fact that people are doing react-native and not Cordova must mean something.

Meanwhile, 10 years ago the only ways to do desktop native apps were the old -- very good, but old, with that old feel -- technologies like GTK and so on. Now there are these other things I cited above, and more! It's a renaissance.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#90

Post by fabiospampinato »

One very important thing I'd like to highlight: using one shared browser instance rather than N is not gonna make your apps that consume 1GB+ of memory suddenly consume much less than that, the problem for those apps is the code they run, it's not the language, it's not the platform, it's the badly written code, and Tauri doesn't change that.
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