tauri VS dioxus

Early in the development journey, the decision came to use either Tauri or Electron to build the app. Using one of these frameworks offered a promising way to avoid writing native code for each platform (Windows, macOS, Linux). This meant a crucial choice needed consideration.

Tauri is a desktop application framework that serves as an alternative to Electron. (From Tauri v2, it also supports mobile apps.)

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

I also prefer the mental model of immediate mode, but when I played with Dioxus[0] for a rust fullstack hobby project[1], I was able to adapt.

I liked the DX with the tools and the `rsx!` macro. The use of `#[cfg(feature = "server")]` to define server-side code is interesting, it lets you keep a shared codebase for frontend and backend, while still controlling what gets compiled to WASM for the client.

[0] -- https://dioxuslabs.com/

[1] -- https://blazingboard.ch/ (not mobile friendly, sorry)

Dioxus has one of the largest community support with over 20k GitHub stars.

> Are there any approaches which implement server-side rendered SPAs with Rust? In that case Rust would render the HTML for the first load and server JSON APIs for changes in the SPA

Yes, frameworks like Dioxus (https://github.com/dioxuslabs/dioxus) implement next.js-like "fullstack" SPAs in Rust (the client-side code compiles to WASM).

> Rendering the HTML is performance-intensive in my experience, using Rust could save up quite some computational resources.

The server-side performance is indeed much better than JS alternatives (client-side performance is more or less the same).

Today I want to share with you a deep frustration, a boiling discontent built up over two sleepless weekends trying to report and explain multiple security vulnerabilities to a well-known and publicly available open-source project in the Rust ecosystem: Dioxus. For those unfamiliar, Dioxus is a modern full-stack UI framework for Rust, and its promises are big. It aims to deliver the kind of seamless development experience we've grown to expect from JavaScript ecosystems, but powered by Rust's memory safety and type system. While its goals are admirable and its developers clearly passionate, what I've encountered has exposed a darker side of the modern "move fast and break things" mindset that has mixed into even our most robust and theoretically secure ecosystems.

Dioxus

Rust? It's built clean from the ground up. The crates.io registry is full of modern, safe, composable libraries. You've got Axum, Rocket and Actix for backends, Leptos, Dioxus, and Yew for frontend, and more. Every library you use follows the same philosophy: safety, performance, and zero tolerance for ambiguity.

> To my knowledge there is not a Vue/React-WASM-type framework out there yet or any framework for building web apps in WASM (without starting from a blank canvas).

Not sure if these qualify, but these Rust web frameworks use wasm:

https://dioxuslabs.com/

https://leptos.dev/

https://yew.rs/