druid VS tauri

For GUI applications, the story is mixed. There are several GUI frameworks in active development, but nothing as polished and battle-tested as Electron for TypeScript. There are bindings to GTK, but they're cumbersome to work with, and I wouldn't recommend it to a Rust newbie. There's also Tauri, which is a bit like Electron and lets you write the GUI in HTML/CSS/JS and the business logic in Rust.

Concerning GUI frameworks, the most common ones are druid, egui and iced. All three of them run native and on the Web.

Going to give a shoutout to druid. I've recently tried it with the Lapce editor and it's just so smooth, fast and works so well for a pre-alpha app.

As iced and egui were difficult for me, i started with druid.

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.

Druid should be good for most cases, it has a lot of built-in widget for the UI, you can even make a custom widget with a canvas-alike painting API.

Druid, which is a Rust-native UI toolkit for building desktop applications targeting Windows/macOS/Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, has a new version out - v0.8.

There's a memoize View node in the previous iteration of the Xilem prototype, but it hasn't made it in to the current branch yet. That sounds like what you're asking, but it's possible I'm missing something.

You can use GTK from Rust. But the Rust native ones aren't really there yet. [Iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced) which has been picked up by System76 and [Druid](https://github.com/linebender/druid) (and it's next gen version [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem)) are the ones to watch, along with Dioxus which is the main post here.

I'd expect there to be something useable by the end of 2023.

Tauri is a Rust-based library that enables you to build lightweight desktop applications by leveraging web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the UI. You can use any frontend framework of your choice that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Unlike Electron (a JavaScript desktop app development framework), which relies on Chromium and Node.js, Tauri uses the system's native web view.

Then I learned Tauri and used my favourite frontend framework SolidJS with TailwindCSS and DaisyUI to build the UI with MotionOne to add animations and Tauri to build the desktop/web/android/ios app.

tauri dev is incredibly slow

Are the memory benchmarks measured correctly?

This tauri issue suggests the common measurement approach might be wrong

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/5889

Also would be better to have specific startup time instead of "fast" (which is strange since electron is not known for fast startup)

Here is a whole story: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/4089

tl;dr - Tauri uses platform's default implementation of a webview. On Windows it's WebView2 which reports back to MS.

I mean, most OSes already ship with a WebView component that you can use instead of shipping an entire browser runtime.

Wails does that: https://wails.io/

Tauri also does that: https://tauri.app/

That does help with the needed resources quite a bit: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

Sadly it doesn’t change the memory usage much so the technology is still inherently wasteful, but on a certain level it feels like a lost battle - because web technologies often feel like the choice of least resistance when you want GUI software that will run on a bunch of platforms while not being annoying to develop (from the perspective of your run of the mill dev).

HTML/CSS can still be used for the frontend even without Electron. Some frameworks use the OS bundled web renderer instead:

- For Rust apps: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

- For Go apps: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

Official Website: https://tauri.app/ (v2.0)

In the article, the claim is made: if many popular software products like Slack, VSCode, and Docker Desktop all use Electron, then it must be good.

In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.

That's why there are people spending significant effort to develop better solutions than Electron. For instance, the Tauri project ( https://tauri.app/ ) is a lightweight alternative to Electron.

The article defends the minimum application bundle size of 100MB-300MB is as no issue, because streaming 4K video takes much more bandwidth than such a software download. But the bigger issue than disk space or download bandwidth is the RAM usage and overall low performance of Electron projects. Even with a 16 GB or 32 GB RAM system, when you're running many apps and doing serious multitasking, the gigabytes quickly get used up and then things slow down.

For example, if you have used VSCode, try using the Zed editor (https://zed.dev/). You will be blown away by its incredible speed. Launches in the blink of an eye, and it responds to every input with zero latency. We have forgotten that software can actually be fast.

Jonathan Blow, "Will Software Stop Getting Slower?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk