burrito VS tauri

Most of the BEAM isn't well-suited for trends in today's immutable architecture world (Docker deploys on something like Kubernetes or ECS). Bootup time on the VM can be long compared to running a Go or OCaml binary, or some Python applications (I find larger Python apps tend to spend a ton of time loading modules). Compile times aren't as fast as Go, so if a fresh deploy requires downloading modules and compile-from-scratch, that'll be longer than other stacks. Now, if you use stateful deploys and hot-code reloading, it's not so bad, but incorporating that involves a bit more risk and specific expertise that most companies don't want to roll into. Basically, the opposite of this article https://ferd.ca/a-pipeline-made-of-airbags.html

Macros are neat but they can really mess up your compile times, and they don't compose well (e.g. ExConstructor and typed_struct and Ecto Schemas all operate on Elixir Structs, but you can't use all three)

If your problem is CPU-bound, there are much better choices: C++, Rust, C. Python has a million libraries that use great FFI so you'll be fine using that too. Ditto memory-bound: there are better languages for this.

This is also not borne from direct experience, but: my understanding is the JVM has a lot more knobs to tune GC. The BEAM GC is IMO amazing, and did the right thing from the beginning to prevent stop-the-world pauses, but if you care about other metrics (good list in this article https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd...) you're probably better off with a JVM language.

While the BEAM is great at distribution, "distributed Erlang" (using the VM's features instead of what most companies do, and ad-hoc it with containers and infra) makes assumptions that you can't break, like default k-clustering (one node must be connected to all other nodes). This means you can distribute to some number of nodes, but it's hard to use Distributed Erlang for hundreds or thousands of nodes.

Deployment can be mixed, depending on what you want. BEAM Releases are nice but the lack some of the niceness of direct binaries. Libraries can work around this (like Burrito https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito).

If you like static types, Dialyzer is the worst of the "bolted-on" type checkers. mypy/pyright/pyre, Sorbet, Typescript are all way better, since Dialyzer only does "success typing," and gives way worse messages.

   [1]: https://morepablo.com/2023/05/where-have-all-the-hackers-gone.html

The answer was given by the Elixir community with burrito which enables users to pack up everything an Elixir application needs within a binary namely Zig Archiver to package the binary and Zig Wrapper that wraps the Erlang Virtual Machine to be used in multiple platforms (Zig + Rust in the same project 🤯).

Might be worth looking into burrito for that use case?

Elixir is extremely practical for building systems, I know some sysadmin/devops that write their tools in it - which is maybe a bit of a leap for most. It has better support for cli stuff these days but it's not it's strong suit - you can create single-bin packages with stuff like https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito or regular "mix releases". (LiveView is very sexy.) It's not statically typed. There is some experimental skunkworks project to add typing to it but probably wont see any public preview until mid/late next year as I understand it.

I would consider 1 to be the major blocker but Burrito has addressed many of the concerns here, including cross-compilation. The only downside of Burrito is that the first boot has to unpack the runtime (which is sub-second in my experience).

Sure! Elixir's been great. Phoenix is a joy to work with, and many of the concurrency primitives built into OTP make it the perfect foundation for a product like this. And rustler makes it super easy to add low-level / native code.

I will say the big downside to using Elixir is that distributing releases is a bit cumbersome. `mix release` expects that you're building on the same OS / version as you'll be running on, though we're looking into using something like burrito [1] aim to alleviate this.

[1] https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito

I was intrigued so I went to hunt for the Burrito repo [1].

I thought it was some sort of Erlang native compiler written in Zig (which sounds like an incredible pain in the ass), but it's really "just" a cross-platform installer. Still useful !

[1]: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito/issues?q=is%3Aissu...

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.

I think Tauri is the most established framework using that approach

https://tauri.app