Discord alternative would be a better description, considering Slack isn't meant for communities but companies.
I see it used for communities
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Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
61–70 of 253 posts
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've been able to package your java apps so to not require that from your users for a very long time, and in the more recent years, with the compartmentalization of the JDK, you've been able to ship a very striped down version of it, and even more recently, an AOT compiled/PGO optimized binary, so nowadays you can ship your instant starting/low footprint/well performing java code without Java/a JVM.
It's been years since I've messed with Java. OpenJDK can do all that? How big are the binaries?
OpenJDK doesn't do the AOT compilation part, you have to use GraalVM native-image for that and it's somewhat experimental for desktop apps. But otherwise it's pretty easy to bundle stuff up.
1. Go grab https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ (disclosure: my company makes that)
2. Run `conveyor generate {javafx,compose} my-test-project` (pick your preferred UI toolkit). You now have a JVM desktop project.
3. `./gradlew jar; conveyor make site`. You now have a directory with self-updating platform native packages for Windows, macOS (ARM/Intel) and Linux that you can upload to a web server of your choice. Or supply upload creds and it'll do that step for you. Provide certificates and it'll also take care of signing.
That's all it takes to get a self-updating JVM desktop app these days. The same tool can do Electron, Flutter and native apps too (i.e. C++/Rust), so you could also use it with Tauri, but the nice thing about the JVM support is that it'll both strip down and bundle the JVM for you whilst cross-building/packaging so you don't need CI to do releases. From the user's perspective it's a normal app, from the developer's perspective you just hack on your local dev laptop like you could for a web app.
Binary sizes depend on how much functionality you use and how much effort you put into minifying. With the default level of effort (i.e. none) a simple hello world JavaFX desktop app will be about 33mb and a simple compose app will be about 52mb for macOS (skia is a very large graphics library). However, the Mac versions are larger than those for other platforms, and these sizes are still quite wasteful. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. You could make it a fair bit smaller by using ProGuard and other more aggressive dead code elimination techniques, as well as more heavily compressing bytecode. There's also plenty of fat to trim on the native code side.
GraalVM native images are interesting because they have much faster startup time and low memory usage - competitive with C++ apps, even. They take more work to create though. You can see a robotics app that's natively compiled here:
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#63> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
> why not going for a JVM-based technology? Not to pick on the JVM, but does anyone actually build new desktop software for the JVM that's meant to be downloaded and installed by mainstream consumers? Qt and other frameworks work pretty well (with their own flaws) but I'd simply never even consider the JVM as a viable option for desktop software. The last JVM app I installed was probably Minecraft in 2012.
We have a surprising number of customers who ship JVM desktop apps, mostly in industrial control and robotics of various kinds.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#64> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
I guess we aren't aware of any Electron alternatives built with JVM. We started out as a web app so we need something that would bundle web based technology. Besides electron Tauri seemed like it was the next best bet.
I'm curious if you would have considered it if there was a Tauri-like thing with a JVM backend (maybe natively compiled AOT)? That is, if you could write "backend" code in a high level GCd language whilst using HTML/CSS as the UI layer, would that have been preferable to Rust?
Asking for a friend, of course.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#65Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#66> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
Because of Oracle?
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why not going for a JVM-based technology? Not to pick on the JVM, but does anyone actually build new desktop software for the JVM that's meant to be downloaded and installed by mainstream consumers? Qt and other frameworks work pretty well (with their own flaws) but I'd simply never even consider the JVM as a viable option for desktop software. The last JVM app I installed was probably Minecraft in 2012.
For me it's probably Ghidra or Jetbrains IDEA in 2023. Both are desktop, thought I could see the debate on whether or not developers are considered mainstream consumers. I use them on Linux and Windows, so I definitely get value out of their cross platform capabilities. I use Eclipse-based tools at work (again, I can see the debate). It seems like Samsung's Smarthings (IoT platform) used to use Groovy, but has recent…
Its never fun finding the correct java version to get ghidra going on a new machine. I don't use java often enough to remember versioning differences between the official and openjdk. I never install the right one on the first try, always requires a trip to the ghidra docs.
I must have gone through this 7 or 8 times in the last 5 years.
Its also really rare for a desktop app written in java to look good. I'm sure its possible, but man looking at ghidra is a real pain.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#68Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does Rust have a meaningful contribution to the performance and the safety of the codebase here? It apparently has a tremendous benefits: https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/
According to those benchmarks Tauri still issues about 25000 syscalls at startup and needs about 300mb of ram for a “hello world” app. That might be slimmer than electron, but it’s still ridiculous given what it’s doing.
> That might be slimmer than electron, but it’s still ridiculous given what it’s doing.
Then I think your beef is with the class of apps, not Tauri or Rust.
> Tauri still issues about 25000 syscalls at startup and needs about 300mb of ram for a “hello world” app
How many syscalls and how much memory does your web browser require on startup?
I'm not the biggest fan of JS apps, Electron, etc., but it's simply ridiculous to think this class of apps don't provide value.
It's become chic to yell about the good old days when it didn't take your editor a few seconds to startup, and I agree, but I think this lament actually requires an answer 1) in the form of code, 2) in a language everyone can learn 3) that runs on everything.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#70> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems. ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated…
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