remarkable VS sciter-js-sdk

> we can't take some well-tested, used-by-millions library

You can.

Here is an example of Sciter application that uses RemarkableJS library (https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable) as it is:

https://quark.sciter.com/quark-application-samples/hello-mar...

Simultaneously the #1 trending developer on GitHub across all languages (out of ~17 million developers at the time) with multiple #1 trending projects: Remarkable (https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable), a markdown parser and compiler (also across all languages, out of ~7 million projects), Enquirer (https://github.com/enquirer/enquirer), a stylish, user-friendly prompt system.

Since then they've made things that are IMO quite useful, like enquirer, micromatch, and remarkable.

mdview (sources) uses RemarkableJS for MD->HTML conversion.

will give you split-view out-of-the-box. But web dev's will start looking for frameworks in order to achieve this simple task that browser have internally already.

TL;DR: Web and desktop UIs use inherently different models. You can share parts between these two different platforms but only parts, really.

[1] Remarkable JS: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable

How tiny is the output? What is the API? (I couldn't find any documentation. I thought maybe it's in the Help menu in the app itself but all I found was this https://i.imgur.com/6puOMIe.png - On that note, what level of JS is supported? As far as I can tell it uses this https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk which is based on Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS ) Is there sound?

Having normal procedural language for build automation is of course useful. That's for those 10% of cases when "standard" build DSL (make,CMake,etc.) simply do not have facilities.

But the rest of 90% tasks should have compact (easily readable) definitions.

I personally found that Premake5 has quite good balance for these tasks.

Premake files are plain .lua files and due to Lua syntax they are easily readable. And if needed you can call from them procedures defined in again Lua.

So typical project (multiplatform) definition looks pretty readable, for example one project from Sciter SDK:

https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/premake5....

More details.

That's why in Sciter I've extended JSX with translation meta instruction @:

Note Tauri is full fledged Client/Server with WebView (client) is running in separate process with RPC between UI process and Rust code (Server).

For the comparison:

Standalone Sciter (scapp.exe, https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/bin) takes ~8 MB of RAM (with minimal Cairo and GDI backends).

That's 20 times less than even Tauri.

WebView based solutions are not suitable for applets - small portable desktop applications.

scapp.exe ( Standalone sciter engine ) takes 45 Mb showing its default "about" document.

Check this example of native object: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/int...

So you really don't need V8 JIT infrastructure to achieve max performance - just add native objects when needed.