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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#341

Post by ajxs »

cjohansson wrote: post #259
briandear wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…

Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way

I see a lot of people in the tech industry deeply concerned with human impact on the environment and our diminishing prospects of repairing it without drastically altering our lifestyles. At the same time the general consensus in the tech industry towards the steady increase in power requirements for everyday computing seems to be indifference.

These two viewpoints cannot be reconciled.

Every month when this Electron discussion comes up there are so many who dismiss the egregious resource usage outright on the basis that it's trivial for modern computers. I'm one of those people who use Thinkpads in 2021 for my personal computing and have no problems with it. I will never buy a Mac, and I don't want to unnecessarily spend hundreds of dollars on a modern system when refurbished ones from a decade ago work so well. I avoid Electron apps on the basis that they flatten my battery quickly. I switched from using vscode to vim on my x200 and my battery life tripled, I'm not even exaggerating here either.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#342

Post by kaszanka »

ianlevesque wrote: post #318
Neputys wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't go beyond standard interactions and look it's probably fine but let's say I want system chrome to look like the one in photoshop and some custom dropdowns for starters...

Why would your desktop users want your weird drop downs? UI consistency used to be a thing.

Some companies/people take branding too seriously.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#343

Post by Razengan »

yannoninator wrote: post #196

I think the desktop seriously needs a production, RAM and developer friendly breakthrough that isn't Electron. Tauri may be it, but the desktop SO needs this moment, I don't want to see 50 years on and Electron is still being used.

SwiftUI is pretty good, if you don't care about Android/Linux/Windows.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#344

Post by baxrob »

nklayman wrote: post #250
hu3 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So according to @baxrob, Tauri took over control of https://github.com/webview/webview project for the past year. And now I'm told they are moving away from it. I'm left wondering why take over a project if they're going to ditch it. For lack of a better term.

We didn't take over control, rather we helped setup an independent org around webview and other related repos. At the time, the original author of webview expressed plans to work on it a lot. However, this didn't really happen. Webview is stuck with some nasty bugs and missing features, and none of the members of the Tauri team had enough C experience to fix it efficiently. Instead, we created our own pure Rust solut…

No offense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJv2-_--EY4

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#345

Post by [deleted] »

ahepp wrote: post #282
saagarjha wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't want to have to worry about it at all And in doing so you're prioritizing your needs over all of your users'. I think it's fair to claim that a minor convenience to you, at the cost of inconvenience to all your users, might be something you may want to deal with.

Actually it's the opposite. I know my users care more about cross platform support, or any other feature I could whip up, rather than 100MB HDD space.

[deleted]

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#346

Post by c-smile »

gigel82 wrote: post #337
c-smile wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how you position it" Hmm... and how do I do that? What's your impression? Sciter.JS is "an embeddable HTML/CSS/JS UI engine" and that's it. Yes, it is possible to use it without touching native side like ElectronJS, see: https://quark.sciter.com/ , but that's not the primary use case. So far it has around 400 mln installations in embedded form as part of other products, see: https://sciter.com/#customers If you want…

I think your description is technically correct, it is an UI engine that uses the HTML, CSS and JS languages. But to most folks, that sounds like a "web browser/view engine", which it is not. Does it pass the Acid2 / Acid3 test? The power of ElectronJS is not its use of HTML, CSS and JS, but the fact that it is a web browser engine and one can share the millions of frameworks, libraries and muscle memory built for th…

Modern browsers do fail on ACID tests anyway. display:flex broke old box model.

> one can share the millions of frameworks ...

For your *desktop* application you need just one, not millions of them.

> libraries and muscle memory

Not a problem, here I am using Remarkable [1] as it is: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/samples/m..., in other places I may use LeafletJS for showing maps, etc. Essentially all libraries for JS/NodeJS should work out of box.

Problem is that desktop UI has different UI model from a web page. Web page / Web app is usually "endless paper tape" opened full screen - has defined width but no height - no need for vertical alignment for example.

And desktop UI is usually different - small or vertically and horizontally space limited windows, etc.

In Sciter you can show element as popup one - in separate window that can be rendered outside of your [small] app window, consider this popup: https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/select-table.p... , good luck with recreating this in browser. By the way that element is defined as:

   
        
            Option 1
            *Short*
            123456
        
        
            Option 2
            ******* LOONG ********
            123456
        
        
            Option 3
            *Short*
            123456
Sciter supports arbitrary markup in selects, popups, etc. No one of "millions of frameworks" will help you with that.

Also this

   
     A
     B
will give you split-view out-of-the-box. But web dev's will start looking for frameworks in order to achieve this simple component that browser have internally.

TL;DR: Web and desktop UIs use inherently different models. You can share parts between these two different platforms but only parts, really.

[1] Remarkable JS: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#347

Post by 3np »

cjohansson wrote: post #259
briandear wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business…

Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way

No joke, if it weren't for the resource usage of vscode and the couple of other Electron apps I rely on, I wouldn't consider upgrading my workstation (which is already new enough to be energy efficient enough but maxes out at 24GB RAM) but here we are.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#348

Post by 3np »

jlokier wrote: post #109
brundolf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks > Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix I say this as a front-end web app dev who would most likely be affected by this kind of shift: it might be slightly less convenient, but I wholeheartedly think it's worth doing, on several levels. People built web apps 15 years ago in the dumpster-fire that was web stand…

I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites. On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome.…

Did you try Brave? I'm yet to encounter anything that works in Chrome but not in Brave (save for the occasional site that breaks because of ad/trackblocking, which can easily be disabled)

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#349

Post by slaymaker1907 »

ajxs wrote: post #341
cjohansson wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron should be banned for the environments sake if the other reasons doesn't persuade, it's inefficient computation to energy ratio using Electron apps, when there is a lot of users like with VSCode or Slack it probably affects the global climate in a negative way

I see a lot of people in the tech industry deeply concerned with human impact on the environment and our diminishing prospects of repairing it without drastically altering our lifestyles. At the same time the general consensus in the tech industry towards the steady increase in power requirements for everyday computing seems to be indifference. These two viewpoints cannot be reconciled. Every month when this Electron…

No, they are completely reconcilable. The amount of power it takes to run a powerful consumer CPU is trivial compared to the amount of power used in many other common applications like heating, vehicles, etc. This effect is particularly pronounced when you consider that laptops use way less energy than desktops (on average) and mobile computing as a whole is displacing desktops outside of niches like PC gaming.

The environmental issue doesn't make sense IMO, but increasing hardware requirements does have real impact on accessibility.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#350

Post by brodock »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #332
encom wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron exists because there's a horde of developers whose only tool is a JavaScript hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. That's how you end up rewriting `dd` for Chrome[π]. π: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

My god... a 200+ MB install footprint, 200+ MB of RAM usage, requires a beefy GPU just to render its window. How did we get here?

I think we got there also by desperation of lacking good cross-platform GUI toolkits.

The current state is, you either use something that looks like Windows 95 in all platforms, or web app.

What the web made possible is to anyone to create a decent custom UI with little effort. I still remember how messed up was to create a custom component for Java Swing, which I believe is still one of the easiest to do. How would you do that for QT? GTK? WxWidgets? etc

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