Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 435 posts

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#241

Post by peterangular »

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.

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

No it's not. "Web dev" is one of the things in my toolbox and I still clicked on this well-knowing it was likely not truly cross-platform and keeping up with bleeding-edge features.

Truth is all development is about tradeoffs and Electron is one heck of a blob to ship to users... in a lot of applications a lighter weight artifact may be desirable where the trade off of the last 4-5 years of browser advancements may be perfectly OK.

Is it unacceptable? Sure - if your application needs features out of the last 4-5 years of browser advancements... but that's not most applications. If you need a bleeding-edge solution that's truly cross-platform then Electron clearly still is your choice as you're just shipping around a fancied up Chromium.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#242

Post by maxbond »

kybernetyk wrote: post #211
maxbond wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's put this meme to bed. Tauri has been developed for two years now. People don't just write Rust because it's trendy. If you want to throw stones at Rust, there are many more substantial criticisms to make. Our compilation times are long. Those sweet, ergonomic macro interfaces are only possible because of proc-macro dark magic that tends to be very verbose and special case-y. There's no spec. Unsafe is overused.…

>People don't just write Rust because it's trendy. [Citation needed]. Because when your unique selling point is "it's like $otherproduct but written in $language" then well ...

Tauri's pitch is something like, "Electron, but lighter weight and more secure," not "written in Rust." If you're skeptical of the value in that, hey, so am I.

I'll cite my own experience:

I learned Rust because I needed a modern systems language in my toolbox. I specifically wanted something that could be used to write firmware. So I chose Rust over alternatives like Go or D, because I couldn't tolerate a garbage collector with those requirements. Trendiness had nothing to do with it; in fact, I was hesitant to pick it up because I was worried it wouldn't have staying power. (Having taken the plunge, I have no regrets.)

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#243

Post by schickling »

nim2020 wrote: post #197
schickling wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi folks, I'm the user from the screenshot above (thanks for sharing this btw). I have to say, this was a quite unpleasant and unwelcoming interaction as my question was genuine and I indeed did do some extensive research before asking this question in Discord. As a devtools founder myself (co-founded www.prisma.io) I highly value welcoming and helpful communities and offered my help to the people behind the Tauri pr…

Hi Schickling. Denjell here from the founding team of Tauri. Thanks for reaching out directly, and I just wanted to state for the HN record, that we are going to be having a board discussion surrounding the unpleasant event raised here, and will make a public statement very soon. That said, on a personal note, I am quite sorry this happened. We do support and uphold our Code of Conduct, and this is not an appropriate…

I'm excited to hear you're looking into this and take it serious. I think this is a great opportunity to for the Tauri community to become a more welcoming and inclusive place. Happy to help!

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#244

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#245

Post by Karunamon »

staticassertion wrote: post #225
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?

Who says using a ton of RAM isn't efficient? Unless your system OOMs what's the downside of having a bunch of allocated memory? Especially if it isn't even paged in.

I do, because your program isn't the only thing running on my system. Low free RAM means paging, and generalized slowdowns when something else RAM-hungry, like a game or a web browser, is invoked.

Memory is a limited resource to be used judiciously, not an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#246

Post by schickling »

WolfOliver wrote: post #174
schickling wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi folks, I'm the user from the screenshot above (thanks for sharing this btw). I have to say, this was a quite unpleasant and unwelcoming interaction as my question was genuine and I indeed did do some extensive research before asking this question in Discord. As a devtools founder myself (co-founded www.prisma.io) I highly value welcoming and helpful communities and offered my help to the people behind the Tauri pr…

Are you still using tauri?

Yes and besides this mentioned M1 problem, it's been really great to use. I think Tauri has a lot of potential!

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#247

Post by synergy20 »

dangoor wrote: post #179
synergy20 wrote: post #134

Last time I checked it's using libwebkit to render html/js/css, which means, on top of my chrome typical daily browser, Tauri brings another browser(memory and CPU) into the system, which nearly doubled my 'browser resource' consumed on the computer, not good.

Tauri uses Wry[1], so it should actually be using the webview that comes with your OS. FWIW, every Electron app includes its own copy of Chromium, so that's even worse from this perspective. [1] https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry (edited to fix that Tauri uses Wry and not Webview)

I just ran vscode on ubuntu and checked its memory usage, you're correct that vscode brings its own chromium instead of sharing any libraries with my running chrome.

Wry said to use 'default web engine', which under Gnome is libwebkitgtk(i.e. webkit engine), that is different from its default browser firefox which uses Gecko as the engine.

so Electron and Tauri both will bring their own demanding/heavy cpu/memory needs from their built-in web-engine that shares nothing with your already running heavy browsers. Neither is a light-weight solution.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#248

Post by jmondi »

WolfOliver wrote: post #231
wokwokwok wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

To download the zipped version of https://www.monsterwriter.app/ it needs 100MB. If I build an universal file (Intel and M1) it doubles in size. I assume this to be a conversion killer. If you have to wait 10 min do download you loose interest in trying it out.

100MB in 10m is 166.7KB/s. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that most people have internet faster than that.

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#249

Post by [deleted] »

FpUser wrote: post #122
jstummbillig wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"It enables someone to build something where previously they could build nothing. It makes getting from 0 to 1 that much easier." Making GUI apps using Electron tech for front end is no less time consuming than doing GUI in Lazarus for example. But the end result is way more frugal in the latter case.

[deleted]

Re: Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust

#250

Post by adwn »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #207
fastball wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We built our product for the web. People wanted our product as a desktop app. So we wrapped it in Electron and now we have 3 desktop apps. People wanted our product as a mobile app. So we wrapped it in Capacitor and now we have two mobile apps. There are just two of us building this product.

So efficient for you, but 1000x more resources everywhere it runs. I wonder if someone can quantify the carbon impact of Electron just from Slack.

> So efficient for you, but 1000x more resources everywhere it runs.

And yet, to the people who do use their app on the desktop, this is obviously a preferable situation to not using the app – which would probably be the case had the developers decided against Electron.

Post reply on HN