web-to-desktop-framework-compariso VS cppwinrt

https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

Electron comes out looking impressive at runtime!

Memory Usage - (Average of runs) Median of difference between system measured free memory before execution and during execution)

> it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world.

I think that projects that ship packaged web apps but attempt to use the system native web views where available are really nice, like Wails: https://wails.io/ (so for example, on Windows it would use Webview2, so you don't have to package an entire Chromium install yourself)

Here's a comparison of how the distribution sizes change, Wails in particular also has way faster builds than something like Tauri: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

That said, I wish we got more native software, or even something like LCL that can target Win32, GTK, Qt or whatever else is available. Sure, writing components that are available on a lot of platforms and work similarly everywhere is a pain for the developers, but I applaud the effort regardless, since the above solutions like Wails don't actually do anything for the memory usage and CPU cycles, whereas native GUI software is better for most apps that don't try to be very interactive.

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).

I looked into some alternatives a while back [1] and thought Neutralino looked promising except that it doesn't support node modules. I.e. you cannot use the existing ecosystem of node-stuff.

Still, glad there are many options for using web UI to create desktop apps these days.

[1]: Neutralino themselves link to this nice comparison table: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

> but it uses your system's existing browser

According to (1) that is incorrect. It uses WebKitGTK+.

(1) https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

Cppwinrt is in maintenance mode[1]. Cppwin32 is abandoned (with windows.h as the official alternative). It is now possible to deploy WinUI 3 apps as single files in C#[2] but not in C++. From experience, the entire C++ side of WinUI 3 documentation is underbaked to the extent that the easiest road is to read the C# documentation and attempt to guess the cppwinrt equivalent (as docs for cppwinrt are not really... there).

I don’t know if they’ve really abandoned C++ entirely—the compiler team certainly hasn’t, that’s true. But the above doesn’t feel like first-class support.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/sing...

https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/

And then compare with Project Reunion vision from 2021, and where we are three years later

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announ...

Mainly because along the way, as if those changes weren't enough, they also decided to reboot their initial approach with Project Reunion, WinAppSDK took another route, and here we are.

This is only a short overview of how WinRT went down since Windows 8, thus only those that never advocated for it, can honestly suggest WinUI, as they lack the background of how chaotic it all is.

[0] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

Windows Runtime (WinRT) seems to be something they are working on. From what I could read are there a bunch of stuff needed apart from just a development library. I guess you meant this: https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt

Yeah, I closed it because it didn't seem to be taken into consideration, as later proven by https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1123