nodegui VS tauri

This looks like it hasn't been maintained in years but there's a modern equivalent in NodeGUI [1] which also has React/Svelte/Vue implementations. Unfortunately it requires a custom build of Node that merges the libuv and Qt6 event loops so YMMV.

It actually inspired me to write my own implementation with Svelte on top of QuickJS and Qt Widgets but the task of wrapping the entire Qt6 API in Rust proved to be intractable once I found out that most methods weren't marked Q_INVOKABLE and thus couldn't be called via reflection (requiring manual wrapping). Providing a `Document.createElement` API that created Qt Widgets with working attributes and event handling worked surprisingly well though!

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

Hi, so this NodeGui library for building apps with native components is something I really want to get into, but, it does not work for me.. so I am starting this thread to check with yous (I depleted google results) if any one of you have tips or workarounds I can use. I wish to build a desktop app, but I really do not want to bundle a web browser for that purpose and NodeGui seems perfect.

Use NodeGui (or some equivalent tool) for this. Source: https://docs.nodegui.org/ This is needed because this entire project will run natively, by that I mean it will run with no browser, no local host and it no internet connection.

NodeGUI

Let's continue exploring Electron alternatives. This time, NodeGui. NodeGui uses Qt5 instead of Chromium, so we'll be leaving the familiar web development behind, but it tries to not be too far from it, as web development is what everyone knows.

(Disclaimer: My knowledge of Rust very limited, but I have quite a bit of experience with getting Qt/KDE classes to work with other languages.)

You are absolutely right. The effort to be acceptable bindings for Qt would be a tiny fraction of the cost compared to building a whole new Rust native GUI library.

Qt is huge set of libraries with an equally huge API. But there are a lot of shortcuts and smart ways of approaching the problem to get what you want out of Qt for minimum effort.

Bindings like PyQt and even PySide go for the nuclear option of generating bindings for the whole Qt API and trying to match the C++ API in style too. This is an absolutely massive huge task. Also, getting people to contribute to an open source bindings project is hard. Getting people to contribute to a bindings generator is even harder.

NodeGui https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui, Qt bindings for Nodejs, on the other hand takes a very different approach which in one way is low-tech but I think is actually very smart. I'll summerise the differences:

* It focuses on Qt Widgets first. This greatly reduces the amount of work to the parts that people actually need. (BTW, if you just want QML and Rust back-end then Jos van den Oever's work at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/rust-qt-binding-generator has probably got you covered already.)

There is actually a new GUI framework based out of Qt (a C++ GUI framework) that I have found recently : https://docs.nodegui.org/

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