fyne VS webview

Go has an io library that enables a developer to access the host file system. Building a GUI application that interacts with the native file system requires the developer to try to make the user experience the same, or similar, across platforms. We want a user to be able to work with the application without having to learn multiple ways to respond to application prompts to open files. Fortunately, fyne.io provides a fairly robust cross-platform toolset with which to accomplish this task.

The CPU monitor dashboard layout was fairly straightforward using the fyne.io framework. Like most GUIs, you create all your display objects and widgets, add containers for structuring the objects in columns, rows, and grids, and then place the containers into a window. I set up some control buttons with associated functions that get invoked when they are pressed. I also set up some label widgets to display specific CPU fields and data. I decided that it would be simpler for displaying memory if I pre-formatted memory in blocks of strings before placing them in containers. I created an UpdateAll() function that the controller called whenever it had new data to display.

If you want to look at something a bit bigger I can also suggest looking at Fyne (the toolkit that I’m working on and using to build the app): https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne

Tauri is definitely a hot SEO keyword!

I had not heard of https://wails.io before for Golang GUIs, only https://fyne.io which renders its own controls.

And this is how https://github.com/go-gst/go-gst, https://github.com/go-gl/glfw, and even https://fyne.io/ are using system libraries to propose a lot of functionalities.

You can create the webview using each platforms native GUI toolkit and setup JS communication yourself OR you can use a lightweight library that does it for [1] (search its README for language "bindings").

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview

Each platform has it's own webview control available as a shared library installed with the OS.

MacOS has WKWebKit based on WebKit.

Windows has WebView2 based on Edge/Chromium.

Linux has webkit2gtk based on WebKit.

Tools like Tauri use a simple cross-platform single-header abstraction called webview.h[1].

Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.

In this case, why do we still need Electron? Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?

The fact that Chromium Embedded Framework exists and is third-party makes me think that Chromium wasn't designed for being embedded, and Electron is filling that gap.

This is elucidated here further here https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2:

> it's difficult to reuse their work...if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.

It makes me think that perhaps WebKit was the better choice for embedding. The fact that Node used V8 made Chromium the choice, and that Node being called from the renderer was the original way of working. Maybe because WebKit didn't have a build for Windows was an issue too...

But now that we have Bun, perhaps it's time that WebKit becomes that browser target of choice for desktop apps on macOS.

Unless WebView2 for macOS arrives, which would have a more sane cross-platform story. WebView2 has a very large feature-set though which make take a while to implement for macOS.

[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview/blob/master/webview.h

Nui could base on this in theory. Nui uses https://github.com/webview/webview under the hood, which provides browser windows for linux, windows or mac. Nui adds some cmake to make the "in-browser" and "main-process" part appear seemless, as well adding a DSEL for the "in-browser" view part.

WebView 7k

You mean something like this?

Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).

I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.

The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation

The author shrugs off web tech (maybe because of electron bloat?) but you can avoid the bloat by using each platforms native web browser control. There are even cross-platform libraries that make creating the native control and cross-communication simple. These applications would be architecturally similar to Win32 apps using and communicating with a XAML Island, but the advantage of web tech is it's an open standard and WPF/WinUI is not.

For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.