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Deno Desktop

docs.deno.com

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Re: Deno Desktop

#351

Post by zerr »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #329
zerr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gtk is hardware (GPU) accelerated, while Qt Widgets is software/CPU-rendered.

I notice you say, specifically, Qt Widgets. Yes, classic Qt Widgets still doesn't allow for hardware acceleration. However, the majority of Qt UIs you deal with are in Qt Quick, which is hardware accelerated. Almost all of KDE is Qt Quick, for example.

Yes, I was considering C++ (and C) desktop UI toolkits. Unlike Qt Widgets, QML/JavaScript is a horrible mess and not suitable for desktop software.

Re: Deno Desktop

#352

Post by holistio »

I'm very inexperienced with regards to "JS on the desktop" environments. Does this mean any kind of improvements for Electron apps? Is it possible to port them to Deno?

Re: Deno Desktop

#353

Post by jakelazaroff »

echelon wrote: post #282
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anybody else wondered CEF is the Chromium embedded framework. https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef

The biggest weakness of a framework like Tauri is the choice to target system webviews instead of bundling a browser runtime. It seems great to be able to cut hundreds of megabytes out of your app installer, but the platform differences wind up being a complete and ongoing pain in the ass. Tauri support on Windows is phenomenal. Tauri on Mac runs into lots of WebKit/Safari issues, especially on older Mac machines tha…

This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences. Especially if your app app also runs in a browser, like Slack and Discord — at that point, what issues do the differing system webviews cause that you don't need to deal with anyway just targeting browsers?

It's also funny to me as someone who's been building websites for 20+ years at this point, because the platform differences used to be much, much worse. Coincidentally, I just saw this article, which makes the case nicely: https://www.bram.us/2026/06/21/do-websites-need-to-function-...

Re: Deno Desktop

#354

Post by xboxnolifes »

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…

I understand historical usage of the term with regards to desktop, but im unsure how you could consider HTML, CSS, JS, and runtime as anything other than a UI toolkit. They control the layout, styling, and actions of a UI.

Re: Deno Desktop

#355

Post by zamadatix »

bobajeff wrote: post #310
zamadatix wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that just be "Raw"? I.e. start a webserver and ask the system to open the URL. There is no "special stuff" to do in this case like avoid sockets in favor of IPC to a well known webview or package CEF and no real integration to make with dev tools etc after - it's just open socket and serve from prebuilt binary.

No. As I understand it, the Raw backed just gives you a Window with input handling and you have to embed something like Skia, WebGPU for the graphics. So basically you have make your widget library yourself. Now you can just start a server with deno pretty easily and serve a website. But WebUI will actually also manage opening the browser window for you as well a make the communication between backend and frontend ju…

Raw still exposes access to Deno APIs & ability to call native code but it doesn't seem to assume it should give you a window out of the box or anything based on my testing (AFAICT you have to orchestrate most all of that yourself, Deno just won't get in the way with packaging other stuff like CEF automatically). If this is just some issue on my machine with the canary build though, the existing "Deno compile" should accomplish the same goal for a binary version without any GUI components at all.

Outside making it so you don't have to call to open the link yourself, I'm still not sure what could be integrated in the scenario. Deno can integrate with WebView because the WebView APIs were designed to allow external applications to have full control of the session. CEF (the Electron-like) approach works because Deno packages CEF & the APIs as part of the app itself, having even more control of everything. Browsers are meant to be in control of themselves or the user, and have had a long history of fighting malware trying to act otherwise.

Re: Deno Desktop

#356

Post by jcelerier »

larrysalibra wrote: post #330
echelon wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of your Mac users using an 10-year old WebView? We frequently ran into that. And there's nothing that can be done about it except engineering around it. I also doubt it works well on Linux. The performance of webkitgtk is like running an emulator inside an emulator.

Can you either at build time or runtime specify a minimum macOS version? No one running macOS 26 (for example) is using a 10 year old WebView.

But a lot of people are still running macOS < 10.15

Re: Deno Desktop

#358

Post by c-hendricks »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #353
echelon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest weakness of a framework like Tauri is the choice to target system webviews instead of bundling a browser runtime. It seems great to be able to cut hundreds of megabytes out of your app installer, but the platform differences wind up being a complete and ongoing pain in the ass. Tauri support on Windows is phenomenal. Tauri on Mac runs into lots of WebKit/Safari issues, especially on older Mac machines tha…

This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences. Especially if your app app also runs in a browser, like Slack and Discord — at that point, what issues do the differing system webviews cause that you don't need to deal with anyway just targeting browsers? It's also funny to me as someone who's been building websites for 20+ years at this point, because the…

webkitgtk isn't just quirky, it's also much slower compared to more popular browser engines and is particularly bad with RAM usage.

Re: Deno Desktop

#359

Post by steve_adams_86 »

LtWorf wrote: post #306
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a selection bias speaking rather than a reasonable reflection of what goes on in the Java world. Some insanely sophisticated and high quality technologies are written with Java. The problem is like with JS or PHP, it is ubiquitous in many settings. There are a lot of people who can use it because it was the default language taught in CS programs, many corporate settings for decades, or similar. It’s t…

When I started to use elastic search I found out that with some incorrect queries you could "poison" the process entirely and it would respond incorrectly to every single query from that moment on, until you killed it and restarted it. They responded to my issue several years later. I had changed jobs and I couldn't care less any longer. If that's your example of quality… well…

If a single outlying case in a broadly used piece of software is your example of an entire language's developer base, well...

Re: Deno Desktop

#360

Post by bel8 »

Timon3 wrote: post #198
bel8 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know. Does it also preclude features like enums?

Huh, I was going to mention Node's `--experimental-transform-types`, but that was completely removed in v26: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/61803

Wow, this is sad to hear. So if I understood correctly, node is walking back from trying to run TypeScript? Pretty sad if so.

I hope it's a temporary step back to leap forward, in the future.

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