Tauri 1.0 – Electron Alternative Powered by Rust

https://tauri.studio/v1/guides/

by Uninen • 4 years ago

715 233 4 years ago

tauri.studio

SeasonalEnnui• 4 years ago

Does anyone else find that the text-to-speech on the "Tauri in 100 Seconds" video sounds very unnatural?

Tauri seems like a step in the right direction so will be giving it a go.

j0ma• 4 years ago

It's not text-to-speech, it's the video (and voice) of a Youtuber (Fireship) that makes a lot of "in 100 Seconds" videos about all kinds of frameworks/programming languages/etc.

kristiandupont• 4 years ago

I guess it's been processed to remove gaps which makes it sound unnatural and to me as well as GP I guess, antagonizing.

drcongo2• 4 years ago

Surely that's not a human voice?!

chrismorgan2• 4 years ago

I find it surprisingly hard to judge, because the edit style is so obnoxious and poorly executed. I think it’s done by a human, but the speech and editing are both sufficiently lousy that I’m not confident from this video alone—though another couple of videos I tried were definitely somewhat better. The aggressive cutting style is just bad editing, and the speaker has spoken each phrase independently with no attempt to bridge them (which a competent speaker would do). The first ten seconds are particularly grating, with thoroughly unnatural emphasis on the start of most syllables, almost as though each word or even syllable had been spoken independently and then glued together (e.g. And, A, Light, Weight, Rust, Back, End). The prosody is also regularly quite a bit off, and it’s hard to determine if that’s related to the bad editing and speech segmentation, or an independent issue. There’s enough that feels natural in things like intonation that I don’t think it’s TTS, but it’s also making a lot of the sorts of errors that even the best TTS engines habitually make.

I get the impression that it’s a human who doesn’t know how to speak or edit particularly well but normally gets away with it not being too bad (as I say, other videos seem to be better, though they still suffer from the aggressive cut style), but compromised harshly on quality in this case in order to squish more into the hundred seconds… and still ended up 50% over time.

I very strongly dislike the general style.

zeta0134• 4 years ago

The introduction being a video, and only a video, is already a major annoyance. I don't suppose the text is available for reading somewhere?

akmarinov• 4 years ago

Shal'kek nem'ron

linkdd• 4 years ago

Jaffa kree!

moffkalast• 4 years ago

Indeed

sva_• 4 years ago

Sadly mobile support is still far off on the horizon it seems.

capableweb18• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem at all "far off on the horizon", it used to seem far off, but seems they have people dedicated to it right now.

capableweb18• 4 years ago

Tauri is such a breath of fresh air for a web developer like me! I picked up Rust because of it, and was easier than I thought (I've read lots of "Rust is hard" articles).

The application I wrote is a Hacker News client with focus on offline reading and listing comments in threads sorted by time and flat, instead of trees sorted by score (which incidentally, also works as a web application which is deployed here: https://ditzes.com/).

I found it helpful when I'm traveling but still want to read discussions, useful for following along threads that are actively being discussed (this submission can be seen at https://ditzes.com/item/31764015 for example) and also useful when using HN comments as reference to something I'm building. Guess I'm also pretty proud that the client is VERY fast, loading 1000 comments in something like 1s (because of the caching). Like this thread for the Coinbase layoffs: https://ditzes.com/item/31742590 (1001 comments)

The Tauri application currently works with 99% of the features of Ditzes, but the mouse "back" button doesn't actually navigate the internal browser back in history with Tauri yet, so I haven't done a "Show HN" yet as I consider that a essential feature of Ditzes (for following along threads via the "View" link) before "launching" it.

The Tauri-part of the source can be found here: https://codeberg.org/ditzes/ditzes/src/branch/master/src-tau...

Overall, besides the extremely long compile times, Tauri has a been a pleasure to develop with, and I'd definitively use it over Electron in the future. Really looking forward to mobile support as well, as then I'll finally have a comfortable and offline-capable HN client for my cellphone.

microtonal• 4 years ago

Overall, besides the extremely long compile times

Out of curiosity: fresh builds or also incremental builds? If the latter, how much of it is linking?

capableweb18• 4 years ago

Both :) But what bothers me most, is the slow incremental debug builds. But that's a general Rust problem, although seems extra bad with Tauri.

My project has ~1700 lines of Rust, ends up pulling in ~700 dependencies and changing one line in main.rs takes about ~20 seconds for the debug compile to finish (on a 5950X CPU). Fresh build takes about 1m30s but that only happens on CI, so not really a problem day-to-day for me. Full CI build on Codeberg/Woodpecker takes around 5 minutes from push to release created, but that's including other things too.

stefanos82• 4 years ago

Do you use mold as your linker?

If not, can you try using it and let us know whether it improves your compile times or not?

Here's the instructions for using it with Rust: https://github.com/rui314/mold#how-to-use=

capableweb18• 4 years ago

Sure thing. Compiled mold from source and got the following numbers when compiling Ditzes:

- Debug build from scratch: ~1m 20s

- Incremental debug build: ~3s

- Release build from scratch: ~3m 40s

So, seems that helped quite a bit, thanks for the tip :)

As someone who is generally unaware of things as I'm new to Rust, is there any drawbacks to using a non-default linker? Everything seems to work fine as far as I can tell, but no drawbacks mentioned in the repository of Meld makes me slightly skeptical.

bennyp101• 4 years ago

Awesome, I've been waiting for a 1.0 release to start playing around (I know its been fairly stable anyway, but still)

nachtigall• 4 years ago

It still uses node.js, right? Since it is new and for the future, why not choosing deno?

capableweb18• 4 years ago

If it's for the future, why not use something even newer than Deno, because clearly newer === better?

But on a more serious note, what could they possibly stand to gain to use Deno instead of NodeJS at this point? The languages are mostly the same, the tooling slightly different. Sounds like it'd add a lot of changes just for the sake of changing things. Not to mention newer stuff usually are less tested and higher chance of not working.

Speaking about newer, has Deno received any sort of security audits? Tauri is pretty focused on security, so one could assume that'd be a requirement before even considering Deno.

mattlondon3• 4 years ago

Deno does not use NPM, so there are huge gains to be made in that regard.

SahAssar• 4 years ago

No, doesn't seem like it. You can optionally bundle nodejs, but it's not required.

m12k• 4 years ago

According to https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri they are using "Node.js for running the CLI (deno and pure rust are on the roadmap)"

capableweb18• 4 years ago

Which you don't even have to use. I don't. I just use `cargo build` and `cargo build --release` which works exactly the same way as the CLI. Add `entr` and you get the "live-reload" feature for free too.

asoneth• 4 years ago

It looks like as of a couple of years ago Deno is something the Tauri team was experimenting with: https://dev.to/tauri/use-deno-to-build-a-tauri-app-1f7h

My guess is that there's only so much change you can foist on people at once. If the point of Tauri is that JavaScript devs can leverage their existing knowledge and skills then meeting them where they (or most of them) are seems like a reasonable strategy.

productceo• 4 years ago

Is this a substitute for Flutter? (After mobile support ships)

pantulis• 4 years ago

I think it could compete against web widgets based apps, but I'd say Flutter better targets the mobile stuff with their canvas based rendering.

k__2• 4 years ago

For Electron, I think.

k__2• 4 years ago

If I get this correctly, Tauri is neither about performance nor size, but about security?

capableweb18• 4 years ago

Not sure. To me, they seem to nail all three of them.

- The desktop application I build end up being 16M which seems small enough to me.

- The performance is generally good enough, even though I haven't spent any time optimizing things (here is loading 1000 comments from a HN thread https://ditzes.com/item/31742590, even faster if you use the local version [obviously])

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

Sure but when it's loaded how much memory does it use?

rahen• 4 years ago

Per their introduction video they advertise it as lightweight as the runtime "only" uses 180MB of memory at startup.

This makes GTK and QT look lightweight in comparison, not to mention FLTK, a 3D enabled, platform independent toolkit, which fits in a statically linkable 300kB library.

Of course, these require C++, and the point of those frameworks is to enable web developers to become application developers. One can't expect resource efficiency when everything has to run on top of a web browser.

hdjjhhvvhga• 4 years ago

The other lightweight alternative to Electron is Neutralino.js:

https://neutralino.js.org/

Octoth0rpe4• 4 years ago

Like Tauri, this is only lightweight in terms of download size as it doesn't download chrome. The 'bloat' of electron is really at runtime due to loading a full browser engine. Both neutralino and Tauri will use roughly as much ram as an electron app, give or take. You're only saving on download size.

tmikaeld2• 4 years ago

This is false, with every electron app, you're loading ~200MB into RAM to handle the main browser process.

With neutralino you're using the system main process, so you're only spawning a new browser thread.

FractalHQ• 4 years ago

This is only the case for Tauri on Windows because the native website is just Chromium. On MacOS it’s much leaner. I can’t find the thread where the Tauri devs mentioned a plan to fix this, but iirc they do have one.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

I personally liked that I could use whatever I wanted for the backend, but I’m kind of inclined to switch to Tauri anyway since the build story seems a bit better (ultimately I want native desktop builds for every platform).

styfle• 4 years ago

If you want to see even more alternatives, checkout this list

https://github.com/styfle/awesome-desktop-js

petercooper• 4 years ago

Coincidentally I enjoyed this article yesterday about using Tauri and React to quickly build a desktop app: https://betterprogramming.pub/how-i-created-the-focus-app-us...

crabbygrabby5• 4 years ago

Been using tauri since it was in alpha for hobby project. Experience overall is pretty good. You really can call backend rust from js, in a lightweight browser window.

It is probably the most approachable technology for me for making desktop apps these days. Much leaner than electron, like it says on the tin.

flohofwoe2• 4 years ago

Not to rain on the parade, but:

- What's the point of mentioning Rust when the heavylifting is done by the system's webview widget, and applications are written in HTML/CSS/JS, just as in Electron?

- Isn't the whole point of Electron to have version/feature stability for the browser APIs by bundling a specific Chromium runtime? Without this requirement, it was also trivial before Electron showed up to write a small native wrapper application around the system-provided webview widget.

Humphrey2• 4 years ago

I think it depends on your use case. Yes, a huge selling point Electron is being able to control the Chromium version. But, I can imagine a lot of less complicated apps don't need this.

Also, the Chromium renderer is only half of an Electron app. There is also a background thread running in node, which can pass messages to the renderer.

So, I can imagine that for apps that are more background thread heavy, swapping out node for rust could work quite well.

javajosh• 4 years ago

I can imagine a lot of less complicated apps don't need this

Also, more complicated apps don't need this, the ones that want to control every aspect of the render, with SVG or Canvas.

Octoth0rpe4• 4 years ago

What's the point of mentioning Rust when the heavylifting is done by the system's webview widget, and applications are written in HTML/CSS/JS, just as in Electron?

You're assuming the 'heavylifting' part of the application is in the UI itself. Imagine some data processing app where the heavylifting part would benefit from a backend running in Rust. Say, an image enhancer of some kind.

Without this requirement, it was also trivial before Electron showed up to write a small native wrapper application around the system-provided webview widget.

Electron also made the packaging of such an app dramatically easier when building on macos/linux/windows.

trinovantes• 4 years ago

But Electron apps can also launch separate programs written in any language with child_process.exec() e.g. ffmpeg wrapper GUIs

rvz3• 4 years ago

What's the point of mentioning Rust when the heavylifting is done by the system's webview widget, and applications are written in HTML/CSS/JS, just as in Electron?

That is true. It's basically exposing a Rust API and using FFI to the Desktop APIs. Nothing special going on apart from hype and marketing and possible over-promising on features.

Isn't the whole point of Electron to have version/feature stability for the browser APIs by bundling a specific Chromium runtime?

Yes. The selling point here is that there are no fundamental rewrites needed for using Electron but only small Javascript / Typescript tweaks to get it up and running. This is why unfortunately Electron is used all the time despite the giant negatives. As with Tauri, it is basically a wrapper around the system Webview and using Rust FFI to the Desktop APIs.

I'd rather bet on Flutter Desktop as a possible long term Electron competitor.

mcdonje2• 4 years ago

Do you need to own a mac to develop flutter desktop apps? If so, that'll limit adoption.

iffycan• 4 years ago

There's also more to it than just the webview windows:

- Cross-platform auto-updating

- Desktop tray features

- System notifications

- Menu stuff

These are some of the "extra" things that also made Electron nice.

You have a point about browser API compatibility, though. That's the big downside to using the system-provided webview widget.

pornel• 4 years ago

It's an application framework, with UI being only one part of it. It has a native Rust API for writing non-UI parts of the apps in Rust. Plus there's a lot of Tauri's own code for window management, clipboard, networking, auto update, bundling, etc.

Another difference is that it doesn't need to bundle a Node.js or another language runtime.

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

So people who use Rust will be interested if they were looking for a GUI framework?

ilikehurdles• 4 years ago

Well it’s a fun way to trick them into writing html/js for those GUIs.

waplot• 4 years ago

What's the point of mentioning Rust

marketing

nu11ptr4• 4 years ago

This is what I thought at first until I dove in more. AFAIK, Tauri makes it possible to write your ENTIRE app in Rust _EXCEPT_ the view. This means you can take events and send them directly to Rust for processing and vice versa. While porting an existing web app might not use any Rust, someone using this to specifically create a Rust GUI app can use the HTML/CSS/JS portion as just a view for their Rust app for the most part.

neurostimulant• 4 years ago

Hmm, I was thinking about writing a nodejs native module with rust to access some system library in an electron app for one of my side project, but using this might be easier instead. I guess I should check it out.

jeremychone4• 4 years ago

That’s the point of Tauri. UI is html/css/js, and the backend logic is Rust.

api3• 4 years ago

I wonder if they've gotten around the horror of Windows distribution for native webview based apps?

The usual problem is that you have to either use an antiquated IE based webview on Windows or install the Microsoft Edge runtime. The latter is painful to bundle and some people don't like it, especially enterprisey IT departments who consider it "another thing" they have to approve instead of just a part of the app since it's a separate OS component.

Octoth0rpe4• 4 years ago

The usual problem is that you have to either use an antiquated IE based webview on Windows or install the Microsoft Edge runtime.

Windows 10/11 both ship with Edge by default, so however big of a problem that is _now_ (probably depends a lot on your target market), it certainly will progressively be a smaller problem over time. Windows 10 was released almost 7 years ago, so while there are undoubtably some corps stuck with windows 8 as their standard, most of the world should've moved on at this point I'd think.

api3• 4 years ago

It depends on your target market then. If it's for business/enterprise use you have to ship the entire universe and try to support Windows as far back as possible because companies don't upgrade.

rathboma3• 4 years ago

It is these types of platform questions that make Electron so powerful from the developer perspective. In building Beekeeper Studio I already have a lot of OS-specific problems to debug, having to also debug the webview just makes it 100x harder.

api3• 4 years ago

Electron is one of those things that's both terrible and awesome at the same time. It's great for developers but it's a RAM hog, a CPU hog, a bandwidth hog (in downloads), and a disk hog.

But don't blame Electron. Blame OS vendors and their refusal to standardize anything when it comes to app distribution.

j1elo3• 4 years ago

This seems a very interesting addition to the Rust ecosystem. I wonder how much traction it will get, though.

Some days ago there was an HN thread about Rust, conversing about the steep learning curve of Rust. The conclusion frequently is that maybe Rust is great for financial systems, kernels, rendering engines, media processors, etc... but just not necessarily the best tool for the job when there is no pressing need to avoid GC, and/or to squeeze the maximum performance while at the same time maintaining memory correctness. Which, on the other hand, tends to be the immense majority of application development out there...

So Tauri seems to me has a similar issue than the Qt Framework (built on and for C++): its adoption as an Electron alternative might not be as much as it deserves, because of the difficult to learn programming language that is behind it.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I know Tauri is just a WebView component, but programming in Rust still seems to be an important part of developing apps with it (it is even prominently featured in the 100 seconds video of the entry)

flohofwoe2• 4 years ago

Tauri is "just" a system webview wrapper. It's an interesting alternative to Electron for some applications because the installer is much smaller, but it also has downsides compared to Electron (the system web view will be updated independently and may unexpectedly break the application).

As far as I understand, applications are not written in Rust but in HTML/CSS/JS.

brabel• 4 years ago

There's a communication channel between the Rust code and the JS running in the browser. It's possible to move as much functionality to Rust as you want... It's even possible to compile Rust to WASM to use that in the "frontend" though that from my experience is very cumbersome due to the Rust bindings for the Web API being pretty terrible.

Humphrey2• 4 years ago

As far as I understand, applications are not written in Rust but in HTML/CSS/JS.

Frontend UI yes. But enables you to use rust for your background worker (Electron apps use node for the background worker)

anoopelias• 4 years ago

For electron based apps, most part of the codebase runs on the chrominum front-end - written in JavaScript / HTML. Usually only some critical code runs on the node backend.

As such then, the proposal from tauri is to run majority of the application in JavaScript / HTML ecosystem, while the critical parts can be offloaded to Rust. Even the filesystem access is possible in JavaScript side itself.

From that sense I feel this is a good tradeoff.

j1elo3• 4 years ago

Well I agree that it is already a good tradeoff, being able to offload the most intensive tasks to Rust, which is really performant. However my perspective is that of a C++ developer already, so I like Rust as a "better C++"... it's just that I'm not sure others will see it with such kind eyes :-)

On a tangent, I've been forced to learn and use Swift the last couple weeks, and to my surprise it has been a delight! If it had a more cross-platform spirit, I think I might have found a new favorite of mine for general application development.

the_duke• 4 years ago

the proposal from tauri is to run majority of the application in JavaScript / HTML ecosystem

That's a decision the developer has to take, but I'd rather see it as the opposite: the sensible approach is to run just the UI related things in Javascript, and run almost all of your business logic in Rust.

crabbygrabby5• 4 years ago

You can use tauri without concerning yourself with rust at all. You can use typescript or JavaScript. Optionally if you want too you can write backend stuff that needs to go fast in safe or unsafe rust. It's kinda dreamy if you need to access drivers, or other things that are very uncomfortable to do in js.

When you get comfortable with rust it's just like any other language you might use. Yea it has safety benefits but it's just a nice language.

People talk about rust like it's impossible to learn, or not worth it, I think it's a language every programmer should learn at some point to fact check their understanding of memory management. It does take a few weeks to figure out for some people, but writing basic/easy/sane rust isn't a challenge at all.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

You can sidecar any exe. E.g: side car a python fast api service that mimic a website api you call from ajax in the JS.

e63f67dd-065b• 4 years ago

This is a known downside: rust forces you to write correct code, and will refuse to compile until you prove to it that you don’t have data races, all errors are handled, etc. If it’s a one time script, I still whip out the trusty Perl one-liner, because correctness doesn’t matter.

I would argue, however, that the vast majority of software would benefit from the rust compiler. The type system is very powerful and modelling your problem in it lets you think about the problem explicitly and guarantees safety around its usage. You can refactor without worrying about the entire codebase breaking, and the doc and testing system is some of the best I’ve seen.

Rust lends itself naturally to writing large maintainable codebases, and I think that this is a much more important aspect that how quickly can you get the initial build out the door. Reliability is not just for the kernel and rendering engine.

j1elo3• 4 years ago

rust forces you to write correct code

And to that extent, due to the lack of GC, you need to provide it (and keep in your head) with lots of extra information that wouldn't be needed with other languages.

I find that Rust is too strict because it assumes concurrent multithreaded code by default. Which wouldn't be needed for most desktop apps. Why no circular refs or having a mut ref and a ref at the same time, in my simple single-threaded To-Do list Tauri app?

newbieuser2• 4 years ago

It would be really nice if they had their own app store or package manager.

capableweb18• 4 years ago

How so? What could they potentially gain by having their own app store or package manager that they don't gain by just leveraging the existing ones?

sitkack3• 4 years ago

Being Rust means that OSS desktop apps can just use Cargo to install, potentially making every app user also a Rust developer.

newbieuser2• 4 years ago

Thank you for your silly comment, which I remember again why I don't like this place. I hope you get out of puberty as soon as possible.

aitchnyu• 4 years ago

Why does Tauri say "faster" or "blazing fast"? I think it has same limitations as Electron, or did I miss something?

infinitezest• 4 years ago

As it is written in rust, I believe this is a legal requirement.

gorjusborg• 4 years ago

also, don't forget: it is safe.

no-reply• 4 years ago

More like a required dependency.

born-jre• 4 years ago

electron ships with own browser so each app is like running a separate chrome* instance but this a wrapper around systems webview.

i think thats where claim comes from.

edit: embedded lib-chromium thing

wener11• 4 years ago

It's faster to start, faster to build, but not faster for pure web, most of time is slower than electron except for windows, because webview2 and electron using the same core. But if you replace some of your app function by bridging to rust, it's blazing fast.

sourabhv• 4 years ago

I would honestly prefer flutter instead of relying on system web view and all of its inconsistencies

wener11• 4 years ago

This is totally different use case, you may prefer GTK or Qt if you know it, tauri is about giving the power to web devs to compete with Qt devs.

encryptluks26• 4 years ago

What has been stopping them? PWAs have been around for quite some time.

nu11ptr4• 4 years ago

I looked at it, but there is very little ecosystem support for other UIs beyond Material. There are partial Macos/Windows (fluent) libs but everything still seems quite immature. I do think it gets better rapidly though.

wener11• 4 years ago

Here is another one https://github.com/wailsapp/wails powered by Golang, but both of tauri and wails do not support BrowserView like feature in Electron, which means you can not build a brave browser on top of them.

Depends on your skill set, wails maybe better, think building a UI based tailscale app, just make the embed web part display directly instead behind a http.Server with extra 3-5 MB

olah_1• 4 years ago

Wails doesn’t seem to have a plan for supporting Mobile OS’s. Tauri has that on its roadmap

wener11• 4 years ago

If I'm trying to bring app to mobile, ionic is my first choose. Like fluter is not the first choice to build a web app. For tauri case, most tauri app shared part is web based, you can just put it into ionic, and deploy for mobile now.

remram2• 4 years ago

It's been submitted today too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764773

onionisafruit• 4 years ago

By the same person you are replying to :-)

mattlondon3• 4 years ago

Are there any good HTML ui component libraries that people are aware of?

Not just styling buttons with CSS, but actual components like e.g. tab-strips?

wener11• 4 years ago

What you mean tab-strips ? There are toooooooo many good HTML ui components, good I mean beauty, good code quality, maintained by a team, but maybe not good enough for your use case. UI is verrrrrry subjective.

Some link to share

- MacOS & Windows https://github.com/gabrielbull/react-desktop - Ubuntu https://github.com/vivek9patel/vivek9patel.github.io - XP https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/

There is no such thing like desktop native components, you have to choose the desktop first, every desktop is different, but there are always someone simulate the ui.

tpetry• 4 years ago

All these components/frameworks are build for websites, but a desktop application looks different. I haven‘t seen a maintained desktop application ui framework in years.

mattlondon3• 4 years ago

Care to share some links?

I have been unable to find any "desktop-like" components.

There are many many things that just use some CSS styling on native radio buttons or whatever, but very few that offer higher-level functionality like tab-strips where I can pull of a tab and reorder it etc. I.e. more than just styling some divs.

Blahah• 4 years ago

Quite enjoying https://daisyui.com/ at the moment, and in general any framework built with tailwind CSS that allows styling with tailwind utility classes.

lewisjoe• 4 years ago

In my curious search for lighter Electron alternatives to implement Zoho Writer's (https://writer.zoho.com) desktop app: I found Sciter[1]

It supports multiplatform app development with HTML/JS/CSS and the entire engine's runtime is just about 5MB which is unbelievably small!

I further analysed how this was possible, what I found was beyond fascinating.

1. The author has wrote a compiler that supports JS with useful extensions like classes and fancy stuff, even before ES6 came into existence.

2. He had built his own layouting engine that understands HTML and CSS 3.0

Basically he's built a custom browser engine, but custom tailored for writing multi-platform apps. So it's super-fast without as much memory taxes. It's not backed by a BigCo or a huge community (I guess) and I'm not sure whether I'll pick it for a business critical app. But the way it's architected seems far superior than the shortcut approaches that Electron or most other alternatives take.

The project is not even new. It's more than a decade old which itself is amazing.

[1] https://sciter.com

wener11• 4 years ago

sciter looks good, but just don't think about the recent modern web feature, current web feature is impossible to make it right/full by a small team, even ms can not catch up, so they just choose the chromium.

sciter is good if you are looking for make an app based biz which not depends too much on web spec.

EDIT: small app -> app biz

tommyage2• 4 years ago

sciter looks good, but just don't think about the recent modern web feature, current web feature is impossible to make it right/full by a small team, even ms can not catch up, so they just choose the chromium.

Not every feature needs to be supported, which feature are you referring to? Also, given the use case: what is required in your opinion? How does the shift in microsofts scope translate to the efforts to sciter? What did the shift imply?

sciter is good if you looking for make a small app which not depends too much on web spec.

Since when is it a feature to comply to "web spec"? Why should anyone continue to comply with all new requirements? And why do you feel it is required for portable desktop applications? Why not settle on some proven essentials? And why I am talking about browser now?

Hopefully you elaborate your thoughts: I am sincerly curious about your opinion.

realharo• 4 years ago

The problem is, you can forget about the entire web and node ecosystems of libraries, because it's just not compatible with any of the standard stuff. You'll probably end up having to write almost everything from scratch.

Also, whatever you write won't then be usable in normal browsers. So it's essentially just another cross-platform UI library, with a DSL for the UI parts - of course that's still good enough for many people.

wongarsu2• 4 years ago

I agree that Sciter is pretty exciting. It's tiny and very resource friendly, and the language extensions are quite nice. It also is much better at behaving like a desktop application than Electron. Oh, and did I mention there are Rust bindings?

The biggest drawback is that it only supports a subset of Web APIs, even the DOM APIs. Most sufficiently large libraries that do more than pure compute will use an API that isn't supported, so you can't just import a random chart library. Of course fixing that is a sisyphean task for a single-developer project like Sciter.

I still really like it, but if you use it be prepared to either modify the libraries you use or write your own code.

411111111111111• 4 years ago

The biggest drawback is that it only supports a subset of Web APIs, even the DOM APIs

Even bigger drawback is that it ain't Free, honestly. Sure, the licence allows you to use it if the users install the sciter runtime separately, but that ain't really am option beyond development imo.

Narretz• 4 years ago

Of course fixing that is a sisyphean task for a single-developer project like Sciter.

Every new feature also adds complexity and size, so it goes exactly against one of the main advantages of the project

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

An hour in and c-smile (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=c-smile) did not invite themselves in a thread about Sciter ? Crazy :D

Sciter isn't exactly a custom browser engine, because it lacks many, many APIs that browsers would use. It just happens to also use HTML & CSS, but it's not Servo-lite or Chromium-lite with V8 slapped on.

leeoniya• 4 years ago

i think the author swapped out his custom scripting engine for https://bellard.org/quickjs/ a year or two back.

(he also hangs out on HN)

solardev2• 4 years ago

That sounds like the worst of both worlds, actually. A web-LIKE language that only supports some, not all, of real browser features? Sounds like Internet Explorer all over again.

If you can't reuse the same code between web and the desktop, you might as well use a better desktop framework. This just creates a false positive lookalike that is surface-level compatible but really not reusable and maintainable, and trying to figure out which APIs are shared and which aren't would be more work than just working in a different language & environment altogether.

zerkten• 4 years ago

Which better desktop framework for cross-platform with some of the productivity available for web apps? Curious on your experiences because it's hard to avoid a lot of sprawl and inconsistencies over time.

vegai_3• 4 years ago

What is the system webview on Linux, where such a thing doesn't exactly universally exist?

gilrain2• 4 years ago

webkitgtk

encryptluks26• 4 years ago

WebkitGTK is broken in many ways. The only suitable option for Linux is QtWebEngine.

showmeademo• 4 years ago

I had a look at the tauri site a few weeks ago but could not find a single screenshot or demo app to see what it looked like.

It would be good to see what it actually looks like before investing in time to build something.

crabbygrabby5• 4 years ago

Agree screenshots are good, but it looks like a normal desktop window with js running inside.

capableweb18• 4 years ago

You write your own JS/HTML/CSS to style it, however you want. I'm currently using ClojureScript to write my Tauri applications, but that has less to do with styling.

Uninen2• 4 years ago

I find it fresh and positive that Tauri developers take security very seriously. Before this 1.0 release they ordered a full security audit for the codebase and published the report ( https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/next/audits/Radical... ).

The project encouraged me to better my own workflows too, as even the awesome-tauri repo requires signed commits in the PR template :) ( https://github.com/tauri-apps/awesome-tauri/blob/dev/.github... )

smdyc1• 4 years ago

Name inspired by Stargate?

japanuspus• 4 years ago

For anyone coming from the rust side and just looking for a cross-platform rust frontend framework: although not covered in any details by the docs, you can cut out all the web stuff and run everything from cargo.

I have a small `hello-world` example of a rust-only Tauri application at https://github.com/Japanuspus/tauri-from-rust

jeremychone4• 4 years ago

Tauri is very well designed, from an app model to its component parts (wry, tao). In short, it’s a platform that allows writing Rust as the backend and use of the OS webview. So light and fast.

I think and hope that many new desktop apps, even from the new big player, will be done in Tauri. I plan to use it for some of our future apps.

I know mobile is a whole other beast, but I hope Tauri can also crack this one up. That would be amazing.

Tauri rocks!

encryptluks26• 4 years ago

Doesn't native messaging API already do this? Why redevelop an API that has existed for some time.

jeremychone4• 4 years ago

What do you mean "native messaging API?"

Tauri offers a very elegant, secure, and effective way for the WebView JS environment to communicate with the Rust backend. It's not a trivial task to do this effectively and securely, let alone with something ergonomically pleasing.

Anyway, what "native messaging API" are you referring to? Perhaps they missed something obvious, but I found that unlikely.

encryptluks26• 4 years ago

Doesn't the browser native messaging feature already provide the ability to call native applications and create a backend language API? I guess I don't understand the need for every app to basically have its own browser engine, no matter how "lite", when I can already develop apps with Chromium that use native messaging.

I'd rather see a unified solution which pretty much exists then to have a bunch of alternatives that provide no greater benefits overall from what I can tell.

AndrianV• 4 years ago

I've always felt Tauri was too early to be a viable electron competitor, but now that I've seen it used in a huge project (Spacedrive), I think I might reconsider.

mritchie712• 4 years ago

Spacedrive

woah! this looks awesome, thanks for mentioning it.

lucasyvas• 4 years ago

For anyone not on board because of how the WebViews work, or that it uses WebViews at all, the roadmap has other renderers to be explored. I believe the majority of the Tauri framework is decoupled from "web" and it's merely supported first - likely through popularity.

When WebView2 goes multiplatform, you might even be able to use it on every platform (if you like web, but want a consistent browser engine on each platform)

I'm more interested in where Tauri will go next in terms of support - not where it is on day 1.

jamesgeck0• 4 years ago

What browser engines do you even have to support with WebViews? I assumed it would be Blink on modern Windows and WebKit on macOS.

inside_out_life• 4 years ago

They should adopt servo or help revive geckoview, to have an independent default.

torginus• 4 years ago

This is 'powered by Rust' the same way my gas car with electric windows is 'powered by electricity'

nu11ptr4• 4 years ago

Not exactly - Rust is a first class supported language. Iow, you can write your app in Rust and just use HTML/JS/CSS for the view.

rathboma3• 4 years ago

This looks fantastic, and Electron needs some competition.

That said, here's my set of hesitations as an Electron app developer (Beekeeper Studio - beekeeperstudio.io).

1. With Electron it's nice to be able to lock the browser implementation across OSs. I'd have some pause about having to support arbitrary Webview implementations. It makes testing so much harder.

2. It's really really nice to be able to code-share between UI code and app backend code. In Electron everything is JS, so you can use the same codebase for both components. With Tauri it requires two languages and two sets of packages.

  - One example of this is an ORM for a SQLite database. I need to load some settings before the UI renders, in Electron this is the same ORM code.

3. The only Linux build is a DEB.

4. Smaller community - desktop apps are a total PITA to debug, it helps that Electron builds have been tested at length by companies like Microsoft.

klabb33• 4 years ago

1. With Electron it's nice to be able to lock the browser implementation across OSs. I'd have some pause about having to support arbitrary Webview implementations. It makes testing so much harder.

Isn't this the same as you have for web, but with a much smaller set of browsers to support? Ie if you're doing a web app anyway, you need to solve that problem.

rathboma3• 4 years ago

Most quality electron apps are NOT web apps. Beekeeper Studio included. It's a full desktop app in all terms, everything is local, no remote asset loading or anything like that.

For folks turning web apps into desktop apps, sure it doesn't matter as much, but a real desktop app is way more integrated and feature-full.

tensor• 4 years ago

A similar project that I'm using is https://wails.io. It uses the native system webview and the backend is in Go. You can cross compile to Windows, Linux, and Mac.

lynndotpy2• 4 years ago

That 100 second video was really very well done and convincing. I shouldn't have watched it on break because now I want to do go home and do something with Tauri :)

digitthedog• 4 years ago

The 100 second video length is 2:39, far in excess of 100 seconds. Once I saw that I lost total confidence in the project.

lynndotpy2• 4 years ago

I can't believe I was so bamboozled. Worst blunder in open source history, perhaps?

Jokes aside, it was still a good video!

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

5 clocks later too check if it’s also webviews. It is, so I stopped reading

galaxyLogic3• 4 years ago

An alternative to Electron I like is Vercel Pkg https://github.com/vercel/pkg .

You write a server in Node.js, compile it to an exe with Vercel Pkg and users run the exe on their local machine and use it with their browser.

Instead of running an app "in the cloud" they run it on the server on their machine. But the server could easily also be moved to the cloud as well.

Using a browser to connect to an app running on your local machine has the nice feature that you can open any number of browser-views on it, looking at the app and your data and tools from multiple viewpoints. Since it is local they are the only user and don't need to login or "keep a session" and can thus interact with the app in multiple ways in parallel.

I don't need to design in a feature that allows users to "open a new window". That is handled by the browser. Open a new tab to the same or different (bookmarked) url.

Plus there is a benefit to coding both the server and the client in the same language.

__ryan__• 4 years ago

This is neat, but it's only an alternative to Electron in the sense that it's an alternative to building a desktop app.

galaxyLogic3• 4 years ago

It could be a server running on the local machine serving only requests that come from 127.0.0.1. Then from a user's point of view it is not much different from a "desktop application". You start it up locally and connect to it with a browser running locally.

MuffinFlavored• 4 years ago

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

This rocks, especially with some IPC between the "native" things like filesystem + TCP sockets -> JavaScript "bridge".

IceHegel• 4 years ago

I tried to use Tauri for a personal project back in January and it was missing some basic features like windows without a topbar.

Have things matured meaningfully since then?

UmbertoNoEco• 4 years ago

I like it,but even a trivial app becomes a huge +5GB folder in development. The dependencies folder alone will make a node project blush + all the stuff generated when compiling/building. I love to have several apps to work on them concurrently but I wont reserve 50 Gb of my already small SSD for this stuff.

billfruit• 4 years ago

Is there something similar for C++.

zeandcode• 4 years ago

Whatever their opinions on this project. I'm pretty much like it when start to create a small project, it's very light in terms of memory usage, also the size of the compiled binary is way smaller than electron.

CMCDragonkai• 4 years ago

It's possible to embed nodejs (or V8 or demo) in a Rust binary. So perhaps we could embed nodejs into the rust backend and just run a nodejs app.

synergy20• 4 years ago

In an ideal world, the browser could add a desktop or smartphone mode running in a separate process with web surfing(and others like cookies etc) optionally turned off, then it becomes a true universal GUI platform.

dang7• 4 years ago

Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807022 - Jan 2022 (419 comments)

(The cutoff for dupes is a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

password43212• 4 years ago

That's tough to shutdown their 1.0 release announcement because of a general discussion a few months earlier.

dang7• 4 years ago

Release milestones don't tend to make much difference in HN threads. Instead, what we get each time is a discussion of the project as a whole (as you can clearly see in the current thread.) Nothing wrong with that!—it's natural—it just means that different releases of the same product aren't really different stories from an HN thread perspective. From the perspective of the project developers, of course it's a major thing.

I wrote a longer explanation about this if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428

paulhodge• 4 years ago

Theoretically someone could post their new 1.0 page https://tauri.app/ and it wouldn’t be a dupe. In general a big new release usually has an announcement blog post, and those can be posted without being dupes, and they’re more timely & relevant anyway.

Uninen2• 4 years ago

FWIW this post specifically links to the v1.0 release announcement in the form of "Tauri in 100 seconds" video that is now linked from the homepage; this is essentially their launch blog post.

The linked URL nor the video has not been posted before.

I'm just pointing this out as many projects seem to post their 1.3.2 Beta 1 blog posts and that seems to be ok -- or at least I see them pretty often.

dang7• 4 years ago

I know it's annoying when we moderate HN this way and the project happens to be one that you care about, but it will make more sense if you realize that (a) we have to moderate for the general case—i.e. if we didn't have this rule of thumb, the front page would fill up with release announcements of popular projects, of which there are many every day; and (b) the issue with duplication isn't really about the article/announcements—it's about the resulting HN discussions.

That is, it's not primarily about the diff between announcement N and announcement N+1. It's about the diff between HN thread N and thread N+1. Comments in these threads are almost invariably generically about the project as a whole. You can see that with e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764384 in the current thread - which is a fine comment in its own right. There's nothing wrong with these threads! The only problem is that we have to regulate how much repetition of them there is.

crabbygrabby5• 4 years ago

Honestly, I think you all should consider changing that policy. Not only because I've seen it broken before, but because major version changes imply things can be broken at upgrade time, and features are settled for a long time. Good to let people know about major releases...

dang7• 4 years ago

You're certainly going to see that and other policies get broken, but only because we don't see everything. There's far too much content here for us to read it all.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The problem with changing that policy is that the front page would see a massive influx of "Foo 1.2.3 release" stories. This would not be a step in the direction of the global optimum (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

password43212• 4 years ago

Cmd+F accessibility: 0/0 - both this discussion and their site search. :(

One issue from 2019: "Tracking : accessibility (a11y)" https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/207

knowsuchagency2• 4 years ago

Looks great but I can't find any references to how to implement a sidecar with the new documentation

knowsuchagency2• 4 years ago

* found it https://tauri.app/v1/guides/building/sidecar/

Tauri 1.0 – Electron Alternative Powered by Rust

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