Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#111

Post by nine_k » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

fabiospampinato wrote: post #101

nine_k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore stuff that was added to HTML, CSS, and JS for last 4-5 years. You'll still have a pretty solid? GUI platform, likely more capable and accessible than Qt or GTK or AWT. With the usual compiler / transpiler stack, you'll have a nice, fast-to-market, non-esoteric development environment. All without the need to ship 100MB binaries.

Sorry but requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable. Not that that would fix the situation, there are still rendering inconsistencies between browsers when using stuff like margins floats and tables.

But you won't be developing a web app, you'd be developing a desktop app, much like with React Native.

Having web developers learn C++ and Qt instead would be much more unacceptable.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#112

Post by jstummbillig » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:29 PM UTC

mysterydip wrote: post #104

fabiospampinato wrote: post #90

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.

Back in the day people coded lightweight because it wouldn't run otherwise, and speed mattered in single core sub-GHz CPUs. We don't have that same constraint today, how do we get people to write more efficient code?

People around here seem to really struggle with the miracle that is getting into soft dev from nothing and then actually being employable in the capitalist sense after 6 or so month.

Of course it's a trade off! We enabled this miracle by training people that have a very focused, narrow understanding of not even a field but a particular tech. Electron is basically the perfect fit for this type of education. It enables someone to build something where previously they could build nothing. It makes getting from 0 to 1 that much easier.

From a business standpoint, it's simply smart to be wasteful with resources that are abundant (average computing power on personal devices), when it helps you save on resources that are not (dev time). But of course, there is much not to like about the side effects.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#113

Post by lvass » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #107

fiatjaf wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And my biggest gripe is that the product you would get out of the aforementioned frameworks without any design would look.. ok, usable. But even if you just want a website that is not just a bunch of text (though even that require some css to make it readable smh) you have to get quite invested into CSS, or at least bring in a css lib that provides you with some basic design. Otherwise it will look like it is the rem…

I've done pure markup + classless CSS a few times. It's nice, readable and really the way I think the web should look like. But then you realize you don't get paid for doing good things on the web. I couldn't handle this feeling and just quit front-end work entirely except for pages I own.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#114

Post by fabiospampinato » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #111

fabiospampinato wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable. Not that that would fix the situation, there are still rendering inconsistencies between browsers when using stuff like margins floats and tables.

But you won't be developing a web app, you'd be developing a desktop app, much like with React Native. Having web developers learn C++ and Qt instead would be much more unacceptable.

By this logic requiring web devs to write ES3 code should be acceptable too.

The platform changed significantly, improved significantly, in the past few years, some of these major advancements can't be ignored just because a browser doesn't implement them.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#115

Post by OJFord » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #94

I have a hard time understanding why platforms like electron are so popular. The predictions from Gary Bernhardt seem to really be true, in the future everything will be javascript. I wonder if somebody actually tried to make an OS that only has a browser, that's what Chrome OS actually is, after all.

> I wonder if somebody actually tried to make an OS that only has a browser, that's what Chrome OS actually is, after all.

What do you mean then, how does the hypothetical OS differ from ChromeOS?

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#116

Post by rattlesnakedave » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

mysterydip wrote: post #104

fabiospampinato wrote: post #90

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.

Back in the day people coded lightweight because it wouldn't run otherwise, and speed mattered in single core sub-GHz CPUs. We don't have that same constraint today, how do we get people to write more efficient code?

People still write efficient code where it counts. There is a trade off between development velocity vs efficiency & reliability. In most consumer software the advantages of building and shipping more frequently largely outweigh saving on compute, memory, or disk, which is historically cheap.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#117

Post by skinkestek » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

fabiospampinato wrote: post #101

nine_k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore stuff that was added to HTML, CSS, and JS for last 4-5 years. You'll still have a pretty solid? GUI platform, likely more capable and accessible than Qt or GTK or AWT. With the usual compiler / transpiler stack, you'll have a nice, fast-to-market, non-esoteric development environment. All without the need to ship 100MB binaries.

Sorry but requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable. Not that that would fix the situation, there are still rendering inconsistencies between browsers when using stuff like margins floats and tables.

Then do as I: develop in Firefox and if it works there (and isn't a PWA where maybe you get in trouble with Safari?) then it works everywhere.

Less testing, less bugs. Whats not to like?

Contrast to Chrome first developers who often get caught by cross browsers incompatibilities just like they did back in the days when they were IE first developers : )

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#118

Post by OJFord » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

mfollert wrote: post #67

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!

That does sound really nice - would love that with Tauri.

I've never used Typescript, so at the moment I just have the pain of untyped structures in JS-land (and making sure I get it right passing back in to Rust-land) - but, at least as far as I know, if I did use TS I'd just suffer from manually duplicating data structures instead.

(I suppose ultimately I intend to do that, it's just so imperfect anyway that I haven't bothered yet.)

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#119

Post by thejosh » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

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.

It's always going to be a pain.

The best thing about electron is that it brings apps that otherwise would be locked to Windows (and probably Mac) to Linux.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#120

Post by lkxijlewlf » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

mysterydip wrote: post #104

fabiospampinato wrote: post #90

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.

Back in the day people coded lightweight because it wouldn't run otherwise, and speed mattered in single core sub-GHz CPUs. We don't have that same constraint today, how do we get people to write more efficient code?

Get them to stop pushing developer productivity above everything else.