flutter_embedder VS tauri

I'm actually working on this as a side project (here).

I personally settled on Flutter. It's a modern declarative UI framework by Google that was designed for mobile apps, but it can also do desktop and web these days. It can be used as a library using its embedder API that can render to Vulkan, Metal and OpenGL. So, it can be embedded in a wgpu context (here's my prototype for that based on wgpu/Vulkan and winit). Flutter uses Dart for UI programming, which is fine for me, since a lot of iteration is necessary for that, and Flutter allows Dart code to be hot reloaded during development (so you just have to save your file and the running application is updated automatically, keeping all of its state intact). Rust wouldn't be able to do that at the moment. Web support is trivial, because Flutter Web allows integrating HTML elements between its UI layers. I can simply insert a canvas there and link that to wgpu.

Here's the repository.

I've started writing my own Flutter shell here that runs on all desktop and mobile systems Flutter supports without any platform-specific code paths. The trick is that I'm delegating the responsibility for platform-specific code to a generic library (winit in this case) and so keep it out of my codebase.

I've started a project for using Rust for a shell using the Flutter Engine's embedder interface, so it’s trivial to integrate Rust into the system. It’s available here.

What I'm currently looking into is using Flutter for UI drawing instead of web tech. It has a built-in compositing API that allows interleaving native drawing with its surfaces and has a Vulkan renderer. The only downside is that you have to write a shell for it that maps the native platform to its APIs, which is very underdocumented and needs a lot of code, for example for handling keyboard input. Here's my progress so far. It comes with shells for all of its supported platforms, but they all use OpenGL or Metal (for iOS/macOS).

I need to check out how well this combines with my Rust-based Flutter shell.

I personally spent a significant part of my spare time in the last few months researching this topic, and came to the conclusion that for my (very similar) project, I'd like to use Flutter and Dart for the UI and Rust with wgpu (maybe bevy) for the rendering backend. I'm working on an integration for native platforms (so everything except web) right now, it's available in earliest alpha here. Web itself is trivial, because you can simply mount a separate canvas as a platformview and use that for wgpu, completely separating the two worlds.

Unfortunately, I'm really busy these days so I don't have any time for any more projects. I'm currently working on this project, which allows using the UI framework Flutter together with wgpu, so I'd say that it's adjacent to your project.

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