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

Deno Desktop

docs.deno.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 418 posts

Re: Deno Desktop

#61

Post by kajman »

pjmlp wrote: post #20
jorisw wrote: post #3

> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will v…

Yeah, it is mostly laziness and cost cutting at the expense of users. Nowadays there isn't even an excuse anymore, just vibe code it away in native frameworks.

I never thought I'd defend Electron, but I'd rather use the bloated web UI than a vibe coded Qt/GTK version I'm positive will not have seen any human QA.

Re: Deno Desktop

#62

Post by eterevsky »

jorisw wrote: post #13
utopiah wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look native to the OS Is that a problem? A button with a legible label is a button. The host OS doesn't have to look exactly like the applications it runs.

Consistency is a large factor in any good design, UI design more so.

Within OS consistency is much less of thing a thing than Web design conventions. Windows by itself has had several different UI frameworks over the years, so different "native" Windows programs can look completely different from each other.

Re: Deno Desktop

#63

Post by numlock86 »

How does this differ from electrobun, which they explicitly mention, but make no point about? I had a quick drive with deno desktop and don't see how it's better. If anything it's lacking in comparison in my opinion. But hey, we can build desktop apps with deno now, too. So they got that going I guess ...

Re: Deno Desktop

#64

Post by aabhay »

fiatpandas wrote: post #46
swiftcoder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you get a reliable rendering engine How is it more reliable than Tauri - aren't they both using the system webview?

Deno desktop can use system web view OR embed CEF. Tauri is just system web view.

The benefit of Deno Desktop is it's like Tauri except for when you want it to be Electron???

Re: Deno Desktop

#65

Post by actionfromafar »

numlock86 wrote: post #63

How does this differ from electrobun, which they explicitly mention, but make no point about? I had a quick drive with deno desktop and don't see how it's better. If anything it's lacking in comparison in my opinion. But hey, we can build desktop apps with deno now, too. So they got that going I guess ...

I think for a little while longer, you can catch bun anything, electro or not, refugeess just by not being bun.

Re: Deno Desktop

#66

Post by leleat »

> Shared CEF runtime across apps. Every app currently bundles its own CEF copy. A managed shared runtime would drop binary sizes to a few MB per app. On the roadmap.

This[0] sounds interesting. I am not familiar with CEF, so I wonder how the versioning works. When different apps require different versions of CEF, do we just essentially end up with the electron model where every app bundles their own browser (just slightly less bad). Or is there still an advantage to a "shared runtime" in that case?

[0]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/comparison/

Re: Deno Desktop

#67

Post by smackeyacky »

jorisw wrote: post #3

> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will v…

Looking native has long left the station as an objection about a UI.

Like 25 years ago. Nobody gives a damn since Microsoft stopped giving a damn.

Re: Deno Desktop

#68

Post by ga_to »

eklavya wrote: post #38
fny wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live reload. GUI development in compiled languages is a pain compared to web development.

Try dioxus, it has live reload but it's a work in progress.

Dioxus seems to be 'just' another way to generate HTML on the desktop. Electron but Rust? Is there a legitimate upside there?

Re: Deno Desktop

#69

Post by kombine »

vinkelhake wrote: post #35
DiabloD3 wrote: post #31

I don't get the point of this. The world is trying to make computers faster and more accessible, more web UI slop isn't going to help that. Dumping Javascript entirely is the first step on that road.

I've seen variants of this comment for many years. The alternative to "web UI slop" would presumably be one of the many native toolkits. I see it in a different way. The fact that "web UI slop" has managed to make great inroads on the desktop is an indictment of the state of native toolkits. If you think it's a problem that desktop apps are being written with web toolkits, the solution for that isn't to shame (as the…

Yes, native UI toolkits are not perfect, even though I consider Qt very close to one (I'm sure naysayers will find nitpicks). In the end, the choice is between the apps that eat 1GB of your RAM and learning to deal with some idiosyncrasies of native toolkits.

Re: Deno Desktop

#70

Post by aabhay »

bel8 wrote: post #26

I'm happy for competition in this space, specially because Deno can run true TypeScript directly and not just strip types like the current Node implementation. With that said, this is going to eat a lot of Tauri market. Why would I use Tauri now? The 150mb of additional bundle size is just an extra 1 to 10 seconds of download time in most internet connections and you get a reliable rendering engine.

Tauri doesn't lock you in to one JS ecosystem. In fact, it doesn't require you to use javascript at all.

Also, we've had several developer framework startups get acquired -- Astro, Nuxt, UV, Bun, Vite. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in a software that you want to last and give support for years.

Post reply on HN