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Deno Desktop

docs.deno.com

101–110 of 418 posts

Re: Deno Desktop

#101
post #20
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 have better things to do than spend my time adopting UI for various different systems. If Electron gives me the option to easily create a UI that looks the same everywhere, then I'll pick Electron over anything else any day.

Re: Deno Desktop

#103
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…

> 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 vary between browsers. The irritating, and unnecessary, pedantry.

Indeed. Even Qt isn't native, in the most purist sense.

Re: Deno Desktop

#104

Similar to something I'm working on for games: https://jumpjet.dev WASM you can bundle for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and web. Unlike Deno Desktop, it doesn't rely on a browser engine.

Do you mean "Unlike Deno Desktop"? Deno Desktop definitely relies on a browser engine.

Re: Deno Desktop

#105
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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???

This is a feature many apps actually need.

E.g. Tauri uses WebKitGTK on Linux, which has historically been slow, unstable, and frequently lagging behind the main WebKit project. This is enough of an issue that even Tauri is working on the ability to use CEF instead of the system web view in Tauri apps.

Things are generally fine on recent versions of Windows and macOS. The system web views on these platforms will be evergreen versions of WebKit or Blink. But if you want to support very old versions of Windows or macOS, you might choose to use CEF instead of wrestling with Safari-from-five-years-ago.

Re: Deno Desktop

#106
post #61
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But GIMP! /s

Re: Deno Desktop

#107
Curious to know who is using Deno in anger most days and in production full time? It seems like the choice of JS runtimes exploded over the past few years with that, Bun, etc.

Re: Deno Desktop

#108
post #66

> 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 sli…

Web devs are used to their target being evergreen, so I suppose you could opt in or out of that model: "just give me what you got".

> Web devs are used to their target being evergreen

I would think/hope web developers are used to “just give me what you got”. Any other mindset leads to “you must install to see this site”.

It’s Electron devs that are used to that.

Re: Deno Desktop

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not part of the Apple world, but I thought they gave a damn?

Liquid Glass says no, they don't give a flying fuck any more.

Re: Deno Desktop

#110
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With Dioxus, program logic compiles to native code instead of running it through a JS engine, and it ships its own HTML renderer (Blitz) instead of bundling a whole browser. So it's a lot more lightweight and performant than Electron. As a minor bonus, the live-reload is also faster than what frameworks like React do. It truly has subsecond latency, which isn't exactly a game changer but is nice when iterating on vis…

Sounds similar to Wails. It does the same but with Go instead of Rust.
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