> Mac - 4.17 MB
> Windows - 4.13 MB
> Linux - 73.8 MB
One is not like the others.
Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
101–110 of 253 posts
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#102My tip for the main product Linen:
At the moment I hop into many of the chats and they aren't too active. Which is fine but makes discovery a bit boring.
Why not have the feed of the latest messages from your top 50 trusted Linen workspaces (should I call them sheets? duvets? covers? :-)). Then I can see active discussions that are happening and join in.
Also use Linen for your own day to day team activities. Assuming there is a private channel concept for stuff that is secret that'll create more activity and make it interesting to follow.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you offer developers the choice of either embedding a whole web browser and not dealing with platform differences, or not embedding a whole web browser and dealing with differences between the now-evergreen browser engines on each major platform, many may pick the latter to be more user-friendly. I certainly would.
But as long as you’re maintaining a webapp anyways, you still have to do all that browser support. Using tauri doesn’t make it worse than a webapp that only runs in a browser context.
Exactly; electron only gives you a benefit on that front if you don't otherwise have a need to be portable.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you offer developers the choice of either embedding a whole web browser and not dealing with platform differences, or not embedding a whole web browser and dealing with differences between the now-evergreen browser engines on each major platform, many may pick the latter to be more user-friendly. I certainly would.
You mean the former?
No, I mean the latter: picking "not embedding a whole web browser" is worth it for the user-friendliness, even though it means having to deal with those browser differences, which have grown a lot less onerous than they used to be.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#105> 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.
I do Java desktop, using JavaFX. But I’m nobody.
I will say that my dev cycle builds (full clean and rebuild) take about 20s, which is nice. That nets me a “runnable fat jar”. Running the packager for the platform installers takes longer on top of that, but that’s not part of my dev cycle.
I dev on macOS, I have “tested” on Ubuntu and Windows, and the app works. My buttons button, cut and paste works, drag and drop (I can drag one of my generated images and drop it into, say, Word) works, I can generate PDFs via the “print to PDF” features of the platforms, including my custom fonts. I also have, like, 10 lines of code that uses JavaFX 3D — and that works.
It all works, and so far, knock on wood, the “cross platform” parts are doing what they’re supposed to do.
All that said, germane to the overall topic, there’s this funny little tidbit. In my app, all my bundled documentation is simply in HTML using bundled pages. And I show that in a JavaFX WebView. And WebView is built on WebKit. So in the end, if you need any HTML in your app, you bundle WebKit anyway.
Of course, if you don’t, WebView is in its own module that you don’t have to ship if you don’t need it.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#106> 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…
Or why not use Flutter? You can integrate with Rust as FFI via flutter_rust_bridge. That's what I do as Flutter is pretty cross platform yet much leaner than even using a browser engine.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#107I build and ship a production application using tauri and linux support is the most painful experience I had in a long time. They use WebKit GTK which is really not a good fondation IMO, its hard to test for all versions, its much slower than other browser, it has weird bugs. In general the idea of not shipping a browser bundle is nice, in practice it doesn't really work for a startup. It's just too much unrelated te…
I have used Tauri (or more accurately, WRY) for Windows and macOS and it worked very great in my opinion. It still needed some tweaks to suit my needs, which was the main reason I didn't use Tauri proper, but I guess your issues are more related to the lack of well-known system web view in linux. It might make sense for Tauri to bundle the browser engine only for linux if this is a big concern.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ridiculou…
> it's simply ridiculous to think this class of apps don't provide value.
They absolutely provide value. I’m not questioning that. I’m just sad and frustrated by the lack of any better options for application developers.
We desperately need a good, lightweight, feature rich, cross platform application framework. Making something good will probably need an 8-figure budget at a minimum. Unfortunately nobody with that kind of money seems invested enough to make it happen. As a result, every computer on the planet is either slower or more expensive than it needs to be in order to run Teams / Slack / Discord / etc etc.
It feels like a coordination problem more than a technical problem, with users suffering the most.
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#109With Figma being so incredibly performant and robust as a web assembly app, why don't more apps turn to this approach instead?
It's no silver bullet: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html
Re: Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust
#110Mattermost?