web-to-desktop-framework-compariso VS evaluation

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...

https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

8MB vs 42MB for electron. That's pretty real savings IMO!

It's also using the existing shared libraries on your system, so there's a very real chance a lot of this 8MB might be ready resident & take zero additional space. It'd be great to see what the memory impact of launching a second & different app would be!

Personally I think the Electron hate is because people think every Electron app behaves as badly as Slack. Honestly 42MB is not that bad. But it hurts my soul that each app has it's own static copy of the browser, means there is zero chance for sharing. If you are running 2-3 apps it's fine but I want a world where we can potentially have dozens or even a hundred little gui apps running & it works fine, no problem. That would be on par with native apps & this is a clear demonstration of one way we could get there.

The missing next step is that this system launches a mini http/websocket server to run. It'd be interesting to explore using a lightweight Sandboxing multi vm to host apps on, might make the server side lighter weight too. Wasm, or cloudflare's workerd... The CRI folk have been busy building support for managing work let like things like this, & desktop could definitely pull some wins, now that folks like Neutralinojs and Tauri are starting to do better at desktop webapps.

I'd say the lower RAM usage is a bigger deal than the actual app size. Here are some basic comparisons: https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation

Side note: There's alternatives to electron that are ultra light weight. Neutralinojs is one I've been keeping an eye on. The proof exists that it's possible to make performant web apps run native.