Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#161

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

But isn't this the danger of evaluating something via simple example?

You can make fine websites with just a text editor (although I'd argue how easy CSS is to use) but as soon as it needs to be an app you need JS code, and suddenly the difference isn't so great. Infact, I'd probably find a traditional prog-lang easier to use in that case.

I think the real advantage of JS is the robustness of its sandbox & permission system, that's what really needs reproducing.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#162

Post by fsloth » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:15 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.

"requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable."

But this it not for "web devs", but for general UI development on desktops. Given some conventions there are decades old 4-5 years does not sound very ancient in comparison. And for desktop you probably want to trade bleeding edge hotness for tested and tried methods anyway. 4-5 years on desktop is a very brief span of time.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#163

Post by kvark » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

mysterydip wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Operating systems should being pointing fingers at egregiously heavy apps. It’s not perfect but the battery menu on macOS pointing out apps consuming a lot of energy has inspired a good amount of efficiency work for macOS ports of things because users see it and gripe at developers about it. I would like to see that taken a step further. Something like the system showing a notification banner saying something to the…

Power optimization doesn’t improve memory footprint. In fact, it can do the opposite and increase memory allocation. Think tradeoffs between memory and processing, e.g. caching of intermediate results.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#164

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#165

Post by zaik » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #146

throwaddzuzxd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still create a FAQ. Discord is a great way to know what are the frequently asked questions.

IRC has loads less overhead with equivalent ephemerality! :) I'll not bemoan folks choice of comms channels, just would be nice to have a consistent place to do it. Between Gitter, slack, IRC, Discord, and others, fragmentation of chat clients is annoying. Pidgin solved this all a long time ago but then XMPP got dumped.

> but then XMPP got dumped

by Google and Facebook.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#166

Post by azangru » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

rk06 wrote: post #154

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.

would you rather have three teams developing one app on three platforms (windows, mac, linux) or one team developing one app for all platforms? It makes perfect business sense to use electron. It opens paths which otherwise would be very costly and hence infeasible.

> It makes perfect business sense to use electron.

In many cases, it should also make perfect business sense to use PWAs. I've heard Adobe has brought a significant part of the Photoshop and Illustrator functionality into their web apps.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#167

Post by jen20 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #142

rebolek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but this is my point. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/3162 > FabianLars, 3 hours ago, Collaborator > ...for example my somewhat simple app uses ~120MB > But only ~5MB is the actual tauri/rust process, the rest is WebView2. So, if 60MB is a large download, surely a simple app using 120MB of ram is pretty outrageous too? > There is no reason why hello world UI should be 60MB. Absolutely, but you ca…

I’d encourage you to rethink whether the “all” you describe is desirable. I couldn’t care less whether an app is consistent across platforms - in fact I consider that a strict negative since apps should be consistent with the platform on which they are running not with themselves on other platforms.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#168

Post by asimpletune » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

shaolinspirit wrote: post #128

asimpletune wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

from my experience the struggle with making native apps is in implementing all of the services that are in browser environment out-of-box manually. image caching, websocket handling etc. which enables more fine tuning for the end product, where in html you can put img tag and that little thing will fetch the image for you, store it somewhere and render in accordance with some layout structure. in mobile dev you need…

Well they're definitely very different technologies too, and the things that you mention, in that specific context, are what the web was actually designed to do well. Basically, the web is purpose built for digital publishing. This is really good for content, as it allows the publishers to update the content and leave the client relatively the same.

Your example of an is a perfect one. Yes, if all the images are going to be loaded remotely, I would say this is a client/server messaging paradigm, and one that excels in digital publishing.

However, if you're going to build an app (which is what we're talking about), then you are probably going to want to store the app's images in one giant executable... which means all the caching and everything you want is going to be extremely fast, probably much faster than what the browser will do for the same task.

If you really want to understand what I mean, just ask yourself "what is the life-cycle of a web app", e.g. what is the "main" method? Are there clearly defined transitions between views? What is the execution/memory model?

When you answer those questions you realize that the browser was built to display pages of text and images, loaded by a server. From there it should be clear why people don't think there's any comparison when it comes to building apps, because one was designed for it and the other inherited that responsibility.

I'm not saying web development as a paradigm isn't popular, but I'm arguing against it being easier than native because it's not really. However, if you wanted to add like a digital publishing component to an app, I'd just embed it into a web view, which is the best technical choice.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#169

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

fabiospampinato wrote: post #83

pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#170

Post by dotancohen » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

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,

If you're writing Hello World for fun, then sure. But _I_ won't be using any of your software if it's that bloated. I'm not going to even complain to you about my internet connection or hard drive space or personal preferences. If you are not going to respect my resources as a dev, I will not use your software. Just like I won't ride with a cabbie who curses and cuts off other drivers.