Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#351

Post by ajxs » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:10 AM UTC

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #349

ajxs wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

These effects scale. If every single laptop uses a small amount more power than is necessary, the relatively minor increase in energy use for one computer totals up to a significant increase in overall energy usage. Not to mention the unnecessary obsolescence of hardware. The externalities of manufacturing new hardware - and disposing of old hardware - are extremely significant. Just so what? So my perfectly good 10 year old laptop has enough RAM to run 6 Electron apps at once?

Sure, your ceiling lights use less energy than your fridge. That's not a justification for everyone to completely ignore turning them off when not needed.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#352

Post by dleslie » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

brodock wrote: post #350

dmitrybrant wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll take Win95 in a heartbeat; consistent, accessible, responsive and clear. Vastly superior to the majority of web interfaces.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#353

Post by stevenhuang » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

twarge wrote: post #7

Downloaded the demo app for macOS; feels like an alien UI even though effort was clearly made to use system widgets. On the positive side, the app is only 4 MB and consumes 50 MB at runtime, so at least they've succeeded in that important aspect.

Same here for Windows. Feels like using a video game UI. Probably is the basic styling, but I'm really liking the file size (2.6MB) and mem usage (app.exe using 2.7MB with the "Desktop App Web Viewer" instance using 22MB) otherwise.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#354

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 4:27 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #93

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…

Also: a lot of our "Electron" apps are essentially Electron frontends to the existing web frontend. For example, Slack-the-Electron-app and Slack-the-web-app are fundamentally identical, aside from likely some platform integration features and so on. That means that, likely, a lot of these Electron apps would already work in, for example, a Safari or Edge webview, since the web version has to anyway. I sincerely doub…

> That means that, likely, a lot of these Electron apps would already work in, for example, a Safari or Edge webview, since the web version has to anyway.

Coincidentally, Slack doesn't fully work in Safari or traditional Edge. Video calls only work in Chromium-based browsers, and in the Electron app which is of course also Chromium.

This is actually the thing that finally got me to switch back to Chromium last week, after using Safari and Firefox for the better part of a decade. The Electron app sucks, I don't like switching between browsers for usability reasons, and I need to make Slack calls for work.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#355

Post by jedbrown » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #93

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…

Also: a lot of our "Electron" apps are essentially Electron frontends to the existing web frontend. For example, Slack-the-Electron-app and Slack-the-web-app are fundamentally identical, aside from likely some platform integration features and so on. That means that, likely, a lot of these Electron apps would already work in, for example, a Safari or Edge webview, since the web version has to anyway. I sincerely doub…

How does one get the Slack sidebar inside a browser tab? I loathe the Electron app, but don't have a different viable way to manage 30-odd workspaces.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#356

Post by smt1 » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:20 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #44

the_duke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> 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…

There is also servo, which may not be as complete as Chromium, but is definitely interesting architecture wise, especially with the number of virtual machines and compilers written in Rust these days.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#357

Post by smt1 » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

brodock wrote: post #350

dmitrybrant wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Qt is (still) very good at being cross platform and native looking. Actually, I think qml is easier than the webstack for newbies, perhaps not C++ though.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#358

Post by FooBarWidget » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

ajxs wrote: post #351

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

These effects scale. If every single laptop uses a small amount more power than is necessary, the relatively minor increase in energy use for one computer totals up to a significant increase in overall energy usage. Not to mention the unnecessary obsolescence of hardware. The externalities of manufacturing new hardware - and disposing of old hardware - are extremely significant. Just so what? So my perfectly good 10…

Even if they add up, they still pale in comparison to the amount of energy you can offset with a couple of windmills.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#359

Post by mst » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

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.

I cordially dislike Electron apps, but once one factors in opportunity cost given limited developer manpower, the trade-off you're choosing to make here is quite likely entirely rational.

I would prefer to live in a world where I didn't believe the last sentence to be true, but in the current world I still think it is :)

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#360

Post by croes » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

c-smile wrote: post #283

swagonomixxx wrote: post #39

This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet. That's why the Electron approach is…

"is this impossible?" Possible, see Sciter.JS : https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk 10 times more compact than Tauri, 20 times less than Electron.JS Yet it has Rust API ( https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter ), that if someone need "Made with Rust" label :) And it works even on Windows 2000, do you remember that thing? See: https://sciter.com/necromancing-sciter-on-windows-2000/

Too bad it's kickstarter campaign to make it open source failed.