Azul VS tauri

Not sure what you mean but WebRender powers Firefox which definitely works on the desktop.

You can use it to build desktop UI frameworks - see for example https://azul.rs/

I'd been wanting to see this, preferably with JS being optional, and just allowing direct DOM access.

I initially thought this was what Azul was, but it's only just using Servo's WebRender compositor, and rolls its own CSS parser, DOM, and layout engine, so it doesn't benefit from most of the work done on Servo, and supports less CSS features.

https://github.com/fschutt/azul

Both Servo and Fifefox make use of webrender, which is an awesome piece of tech and is well suited to render a web page. Some GUI projects attempted to use webrender directly as well, like Azul and moxie-native

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

Azul[1] was my solution for that, it was based on WebRender. I didn't get around to finish it in 2019, but I will work on it this year, maybe I'll get it to be mature enough to post it here.

> wide portability (at least Windoze, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, embedded: Azul is Windows-Linux-Mac only, don't underestimate the effort to properly port something to a new platform

> "though a Vulkan-based renderer can be made to run pretty much anywhere": WebRender is OpenGL + using software rendering as a fallback

> a permissive open source license: MPL-2.0

> a C interface/wrap to allow a wide programming language binding support: yes

> and an easily extensible and themable set of basic widgets: also yes

[1] https://azul.rs/

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Sounds like you may be interested in azul not exactly servo based but on projects that originate from servo. Also this is not a typical WebView, for example it does not use HTML but uses DOM to define it's UI, and there is no JS engine in there.

Azul uses webrender. But your "glue" program is like half the web browser. You also need a vector graphics library to render websites. Webrender only does boxes, but not complex SVG paths. Once the plan was to use pathfinder, but mozilla fired the dev and they still using an old version of chromium's skia for that.

One day I'll get around to finish my library Azul [1]. Hopefully.

[1] https://azul.rs/

azul

Hi, dear Tauri! Long time no see. I published my first post, Developing a Desktop Application via Rust and NextJS. The Tauri Way almost a year ago. Since then, Tauri has become stronger. I'm happy about that! And now, I am very pleased to make a useful contribution to the Tauri community. As a full-stack developer, I frequently face situations where I need to start a DB-based UI project as fast as possible. It's stressful if I need to start the project from 100% scratch. I prefer to keep some boilerplates on hand, which will save me time and nerves and will be the subject of this article.

Hey Thanks!

Just electron & vite. I might actually migrate off electron, Tauri (https://tauri.app/) seems to be getting more stable and it's gotten great reviews.

I think this is the boilerplate I used though https://github.com/cawa-93/vite-electron-builder.

Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.

To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.

IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.

On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[2]: https://tauri.app/

Welcome to the 2nd episode of our series “Building with Tauri”, where we chat with developers who build amazing projects and products using Tauri.

Tauri seemed like the "thing" I should switch to because everybody loves Rust (heh), and because it ships significantly smaller apps.

First of all, I will be using npm as my package manager but feel free to use whatever you prefer. Find more info here.

Today I'm talking about Tauri! Do you know all the various tools that allow you to develop native applications starting from web languages? They often need an intermediate compilation, in the middle of which you end up encountering various problems not always transparent and directly solvable with a language mostly detached from native development. On the other hand, there's still the ease of developing attractive and easily usable interfaces, which are more difficult to develop with low level languages.