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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

#71

Post by the_duke »

908B64B197 wrote: post #62
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…

I have to post it here because it's on top: On Windows the new WebView is Chromium. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview... Old one is, of course, kept for compatibility reasons.

Yes, but it is not installed by default. You have to install it separately, at least for now,which makes things a lot more complicated if you want your app to rely on it.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#72

Post by dmix »

Just a note to the marketing site developer I wasn’t familiar with the “Brownfield” term and that was the first one listed.

For others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownfield_(software_developme...

Also the first comment by brunsolf might be worth considering as the first description.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#73

Post by Brakenshire »

brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

Pity they can’t use Servo as the rendering engine, even if it only deals with a small subset of style/layout properties. That kind of parallel layout engine should make building fluid 60fps interfaces a lot easier.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#74

Post by flanbiscuit »

brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

> I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface.

Like other replies have mentioned, it's not a new idea

DeskGap uses the native OS Webviews. https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/

Electrino (4 years old) was an experiment where they forked Electron and removed Chromium to replace it with the native OS Web views. https://github.com/pojala/electrino

Quark is a fork of Electrino: https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

There's also a way of building desktop GUIs using Deno, which uses Deno Webview, which is a binding for the same webview library that Tauri uses.

https://denotutorials.net/making-desktop-gui-applications-us... https://github.com/webview/webview

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#75

Post by imhoguy »

dylan604 wrote: post #42
hctaw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer shipping executables to MacOS, Windows, and Linux today this is the only assumption I can make. I cannot assume that dependencies exist or are the correct version, I can't assume the user knows that package managers exist or that the dependencies shipped by the package managers are correct, I can't assume anything exists on PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and I can't even assume that libc or libc++ on a syste…

Bill Gates, is that you? This was Bill's excuse on why Microsoft does not try to optimize the code for their software. Just make the users buy new hardware for each of our sofware updates. Makes perfect sense. /s

I think it has changed since Moore's law pretty much stalled on single core. Windows 10 runs fine on old Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM and SSD.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#76

Post by pjmlp »

dmix wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Without wanting to attack Tauri's author work in any way, for me, the only sensible alternative to Electron are native webviews and daemons/services talking to the user's installed browsers.

Isn’t that what this is basically?

Is it? I couldn't find it.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#77

Post by hobofan »

runarberg wrote: post #70
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. Good, then developers might start to develop against standards instead of handpicked browsers. Or if they use a future (unstable) standard that is their own headache (as opposed to user’s; which are subsequently in practice forced to use chromium derived browser). An app developed against a single browser (as opposed to the web standard)…

This is about desktop and not web development though. I agree that pages available on the web should be standard compliant and work with all browsers.

On the desktop you are developing against a runtime that the developer of the app gets to choose, so why not choose one that has less potential for quirks?

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#78

Post by dmix »

vulcan01 wrote: post #60
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…

> 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 Is this really different from the current state of web development? Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. For apps that are basically installable websites (like Slack, which has a perfectly functional webapp) this doesn't seem…

And in recent years this has gotten much easier. Cross browser support used to be a pain in the ass.

Now most of the time changes aren’t even needed. Besides maybe the odd Firefox or Safari thing.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#79

Post by devwastaken »

brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

Webviews don't work because they solve very different problems.

System webviews will always have different features, break things, and are entirely uncontrollable by the software distributor. This means your software will not be resilient to the future.

You cannot access the JS engine the same as you can V8 in most webviews. This means you can't interop with C libraries without some performance destroying hack like copying everything into the JS space through sockets.

This also means something as simple as reading a file has to, again, cross the sandbox in an inefficient way. You'd have the browser, it's javascript engine, and your own runtime in node or python or however too.

Electron develops patches that make chromium more performant and feature ready for desktop.

Electron conjoins the chromium and node v8 event loop to take advantage of libuv - again a performance improvement.

The decision of webviews and electron is based on what you're trying to do. If it's simple html/JS that's pretty much self contained then sure.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#80

Post by Maledictus »

Brakenshire wrote: post #73
brundolf wrote: post #12

Looks like it uses system webviews instead of bundling a copy of Chromium? This to me seems like the real headlining feature, but strangely I had to dig pretty deep to find it: https://tauri.studio/en/docs/getting-started/technical-detai... I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface. Interesting thing I just thought about: since users d…

Pity they can’t use Servo as the rendering engine, even if it only deals with a small subset of style/layout properties. That kind of parallel layout engine should make building fluid 60fps interfaces a lot easier.

Why can't they?
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