DeskGap VS sciter-js-sdk

I've never tried it but DeskGap lets you build a desktop app like Electron, but it uses your existing installed version of Chrome instead of bundling it's own Chrome engine inside the app so it keeps it much more lightweight. Might be interesting for you https://deskgap.com/

> 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...

How tiny is the output? What is the API? (I couldn't find any documentation. I thought maybe it's in the Help menu in the app itself but all I found was this https://i.imgur.com/6puOMIe.png - On that note, what level of JS is supported? As far as I can tell it uses this https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk which is based on Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS ) Is there sound?

JavaScript & Electron Sciter!

Having normal procedural language for build automation is of course useful. That's for those 10% of cases when "standard" build DSL (make,CMake,etc.) simply do not have facilities.

But the rest of 90% tasks should have compact (easily readable) definitions.

I personally found that Premake5 has quite good balance for these tasks.

Premake files are plain .lua files and due to Lua syntax they are easily readable. And if needed you can call from them procedures defined in again Lua.

So typical project (multiplatform) definition looks pretty readable, for example one project from Sciter SDK:

https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/premake5....

More details.

That's why in Sciter I've extended JSX with translation meta instruction @:

Note Tauri is full fledged Client/Server with WebView (client) is running in separate process with RPC between UI process and Rust code (Server).

For the comparison:

Standalone Sciter (scapp.exe, https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/bin) takes ~8 MB of RAM (with minimal Cairo and GDI backends).

That's 20 times less than even Tauri.

WebView based solutions are not suitable for applets - small portable desktop applications.

scapp.exe ( Standalone sciter engine ) takes 45 Mb showing its default "about" document.

It does support , with limited support but still.

See: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/samples/c...

Sciter also supports immediate mode painting on any element (like in DearIMGUI):

    element.paintBackground = function(gfx) {