Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser. Neither do I see how projects like Tauri or WebView2 which just embed the system webview would give better rendering performance. Microsofts webview is even using the same rendering engine as Electron - Blink. What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that.

You said Electron would kill the performance gains of Perspective. You also said it would make a workstation fans spin somehow.

The performance gains in rendering of Perspective are due to using canvas + Webassembly. This would be exactly the same in Tauri or Webview2 because it would run in the same browser rendering engines which execute the Canvas renderer and Webassembly like in a browser or in Electron.

> The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge.

That's exactly pretty much where the benefits end. The memory usage reduction is even debatable if you are not running Edge as your browser. See WebView2 as an installed Electron core that's pre-installed on Windows. Doesn't change rendering performance.

> In the case of Sciter (quoted in my parent comment), Sciter is a bit different: The frontend is HTML, CSS and JS, but the app's local backend is whatever you want it to be: C#, C++, Python, Assembly, etc. That's why it's popular among performance-critical software such as malware scanners, where you need native performance but as well as a you know customers that like a nice UI.

Yea that's why I didn't list Sciter in my reply. With Sciter you don't get the system webview - you get a custom minimalistic web html/css rendering engine that supports a limited subset of the HTML5/CSS3 spec. There's no WebGL and there's no Webassembly. So you'd have to bring your own libraries for that. Easy enough with Webassembly and they could even skip that part and go native but with Canvas and trying to run on all major platforms... it's just a lot of added work for minor gains.

I'm not against libraries like Tauri. Perspective could totally use that to make a desktop app. It would not have any advantage when it comes to rendering performance though.

I had no performance problems, but right on the first demo each scrollbar is broken in it's own unique way.

The main area with the sparkgrid has good horizontal and vertical scrollbars, but they are nearly invisible, being dark grey on slightly lighter dark grey, and only visible if you hover in the area they scroll. Also the vertical scroll bar doesn't take you to the very bottom.

Then there's the top right area, which has a normal looking scrollbar (good), but once you scroll it changes the size of the entire right panel (weird), and if you drag it past the point where it has reached the bottom (really easy to do accidentally) it starts spasming uncontrollably. If you instead use the scroll wheel, you can scroll to the bottom, but if you scroll a bit further you are back on the top? None of the other scrollbars has either of those issues.

Then there's the bottom right, where the scrollbar is visible, takes you all the way to the bottom, and neither spasms nor resets, but just to be special in its own way it starts out as a big bar as if there was little content below the fold, but the further you scroll the smaller the bar gets. As you scroll up, it grows again. It's also stuttering a bit while making these size changes.

Another example besides scroll bars is the lack of tool tips on the UI (they do exist on data though!), which makes for a weird toolbar that moves its content all over the place on hover. And I guess you're supposed to guess that check boxes are delete buttons.

This doesn't take away from the app, it's still cool and useful, but little annoyances like that add up to make it feel weird and un-native (I guess foreign is the word).

Also interested in disrupting this space, do you have a preferred contact method?

We're building something along these lines at https://www.prospective.co/