neon VS tauri

Great interview!

Love how much thought is being put into what you “gold-plate”. I’ve always felt that my best work comes around on round two (or three or four…).

Curious what you are planning for the ability to script the configuration? I haven’t played with zed much yet; is it possible today? Would something like Neon [1] help bridge the gap from VSCode and old Atom users?

[1]: https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon

Neon

Is there a third option? Surely node has a way to directly call native code, similar to Python's C extensions? Some Node equivalent of PyO3? For example, I found neon which promises "safe and fast native Node.js modules".

Have a look at https://crates.io/crates/napi and https://crates.io/crates/neon which allow you to call rust from node. We went with napi but they're both pretty good.

Just to add: N-API is incredibly underrated. Then again, maybe the lack of a strong native modules ecosystem is an indicator that the pure JS ecosystem is just so good. But man, got something computationally intensive? Just offload it to Rust with Neon or something. Got some proprietary bit of code in your product? Build a native module.

> rust is not well-suited for interfacing with FFI

How so? Packages like neon [1] and rustler [2] suggest otherwise. I'm using both of those in a real product (I'm using neon directly, to write native modules for an Electron app; on the back-end, I depend on an Elixir package that uses rustler).

[1]: https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon

[2]: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

You can use https://github.com/infinyon/node-bindgen, https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon, or https://github.com/napi-rs/napi-rs for Node.js libraries, https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3 for Python libraries, https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/ for WebAssembly, and https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen for C libraries!

They can use Rust to speed up Nodejs through https://crates.io/crates/neon for example

I’m not prompted again while actively using my laptop. When it’s time to switch to an open source project, I’m seamlessly prompted for my GitHub key.

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.