evaluation VS tauri

https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

8MB vs 42MB for electron. That's pretty real savings IMO!

It's also using the existing shared libraries on your system, so there's a very real chance a lot of this 8MB might be ready resident & take zero additional space. It'd be great to see what the memory impact of launching a second & different app would be!

Personally I think the Electron hate is because people think every Electron app behaves as badly as Slack. Honestly 42MB is not that bad. But it hurts my soul that each app has it's own static copy of the browser, means there is zero chance for sharing. If you are running 2-3 apps it's fine but I want a world where we can potentially have dozens or even a hundred little gui apps running & it works fine, no problem. That would be on par with native apps & this is a clear demonstration of one way we could get there.

The missing next step is that this system launches a mini http/websocket server to run. It'd be interesting to explore using a lightweight Sandboxing multi vm to host apps on, might make the server side lighter weight too. Wasm, or cloudflare's workerd... The CRI folk have been busy building support for managing work let like things like this, & desktop could definitely pull some wins, now that folks like Neutralinojs and Tauri are starting to do better at desktop webapps.

I'd say the lower RAM usage is a bigger deal than the actual app size. Here are some basic comparisons: https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

Side note: There's alternatives to electron that are ultra light weight. Neutralinojs is one I've been keeping an eye on. The proof exists that it's possible to make performant web apps run native.

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