Wails VS tauri

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

A different option is Wails [1], which allows you to write all logic in Go, and the UI in HTML (with any or no web framework). It's like Electron but lighter because it doesn't ship Chrome but uses the system's web viewer instead.

[1] https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

This is basically the same tech stack of an app I’ve been planning to build, but deployed as a desktop application using Wails: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

Wails 2.6k

The wails project does this when. You can check it out here https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/blob/master/v2/internal/typescriptify/typescriptify.go for inspection.

I have built Web front-ends (React or Svelte) with Go-backend. Embed in a web-view to make it a native desktop app, or get funky and give it native chrome/menus etc. [Wails](https://github.com/wailsapp/wails) is a good candidate to start if you want to cut on boiler plate.

Is that what wails is doing here? (On mobile)

In a "local" environment, where an executable can be provided to someone with the entire game contents. In this case, the game won't use WebSockets, and will instead use a Go/JS bridge (something like Wails) to connect.

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

Official Website: https://tauri.app/ (v2.0)

In the article, the claim is made: if many popular software products like Slack, VSCode, and Docker Desktop all use Electron, then it must be good.

In response, I would say: while Electron makes it easy for the software developer to build and distribute software, especially on multiple platform, as an end user it is NEVER the best experience.

That's why there are people spending significant effort to develop better solutions than Electron. For instance, the Tauri project ( https://tauri.app/ ) is a lightweight alternative to Electron.

The article defends the minimum application bundle size of 100MB-300MB is as no issue, because streaming 4K video takes much more bandwidth than such a software download. But the bigger issue than disk space or download bandwidth is the RAM usage and overall low performance of Electron projects. Even with a 16 GB or 32 GB RAM system, when you're running many apps and doing serious multitasking, the gigabytes quickly get used up and then things slow down.

For example, if you have used VSCode, try using the Zed editor (https://zed.dev/). You will be blown away by its incredible speed. Launches in the blink of an eye, and it responds to every input with zero latency. We have forgotten that software can actually be fast.

Jonathan Blow, "Will Software Stop Getting Slower?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ka549NNdDk

Some time ago, I discovered how RSS works. I regret not discovering it sooner, and since then, I added it to my blog. Later, I looked for ways to follow different sources, and that's when the idea of creating my own application came to me. Before even asking myself, "What technology should I use?" I already had the answer: Tauri.

Rewrite Muscurdi - Password Manager in Rust with [iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced, dioxus and/or tauri