smol VS webview

My understanding is you always need a runtime, somethings needs to drive the async flow. But there are others on the market, just not without the.. market domination... of tokio.

https://github.com/smol-rs/smol looks promising simply for being minimal

https://github.com/bytedance/monoio looks potentially easier to work with than tokio

https://github.com/DataDog/glommio is built around linux io_uring and seems somewhat promising for performance reasons.

I haven't played with any of these yet, because Tokio is unfortunately the path of least resistance. And a bit viral in how it's infected tings.

There is also https://github.com/smol-rs/smol which has components which you can compose into your own executor if you still need async IO but your usage patterns don't fit into the general purpose ones that Tokio provides.

If you need precise control over scheduling, consider building something on top of https://github.com/smol-rs/smol

Tokio is a "take what you need" framework, whilst Async-std started as an "everything the box" solution. Today both have a lot of crossover with micro async runtimes like smol becoming the foundation one of framework and optionally usable in the other. The ability to rip out a small dependent sub-crate (dependent package) like smol and use it independently with ease never get's boring, by the way. It's great way to include a test runtime in an async library without forcing the inclusion of a giant async framework.

Helix uses tokio. smol might be a good alternative however.

No, still active on GitHub. What gave you that idea? https://github.com/smol-rs/smol

Found the issue in Google cache. I'm not sure it's really fair of me to post this link here, but equally I think it's better to give the actual text rather than leave it vague.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PRjMyv...

What do you mean by that? WebView is just Chrome embedded inside of an Android app. Same thing already exists on Windows (Edge WebView2), macOS (WKWebView) and Linux (WebKitGTK). There's also a library that wraps all of them into a single interface:

https://github.com/webview/webview

The entire point of WebView is that it's a browser embedded inside of a different application, how do you expect it to be a "standalone project"?

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.