tauri VS Electron

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

The team at Electron have been faithfully shipping new releases almost every single month. I think they had Christmas off 🤔. This popular framework has developers writing cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The latest update depreciates some process events, and added new modules, APIs, methods, and more. Read into all the changes in the Electron release notes. This month, Electron also introduced a new formal RFC process.

VS Code has been crashing at launch in Wayland since more than eight months ago:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/37531

So we talked a lot about the Atomic Design Principle, but you could just use that in any system and start creating. You could have Angular components, React Components, and Vue Components. But if you notice these don't easily work Everwhere. So the solution is to use Web Components because the modern browser can already understand these, and any Front-End framework can then utilize these components. You can use Electron for desktop (Slack, VSCode), PWA for both Android and iOS, and across all browsers Can I Use.

I'm noticing a significant boost in performance, crisper text, and better power savings. The only shortcoming is that the window which Figma will run on will lose its shadow. This is due to a technical limitation with frameless windows on Linux.

For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.

Electron patch for version 27: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39823

It does, see [0]. Fun fact: Signal desktop, which uses Electron under the hood, is running without sandbox on Linux [1][2].

[0] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39824

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5195

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/4381

Turns out, there is an issue with the electron window not returning focus correctly on mac - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/5495. The trick to solving is to treat quick capture as a screensaver. When closing, you hide it by setting the opacity to 0 and sending hide: command to the first responder.

Open since 2016! https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8124