wry VS pkg

The biggest benefits we derived from Tauri were Wry and the sidecar mechanism. Wry (the second half of Tauri: tao/wry) is a cross-platform WebView rendering library in Rust that supports all major desktop platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It essentially spins up a native web view from whatever operating system it’s running on and doesn’t require an application to bundle one with it. Wry greatly reduces the overhead of “pushing” a browser to our users, instead leaning on the host OS to handle rendering a web view. This made our applications really lean.

Check out https://tauri.app/ - specifically, https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry, which provides a cross-platform interface to the system's WebView.

Tauri uses WebkitGTK, which has pretty bad performance compared to other browsers on the same hardware.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/890#issuecomment-14...

One small note regarding Native Webview meant above. You can find ultimate information on this topic here. In a nutshell, Tauri applications use as HTML renderer Webkit (safari engine) on MacOS, Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, and WebKitGTK on Linux (port of Webkit for Linux). Pay attention to the fact that a Tauri application could behave differently on different platforms according to the information above.

wry looks like a better choice, but no one has bothered to work on this task, yet.

I think this might be somewhat close to what you're looking for: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

They're wrapping the Android webkit/webview stuff in wry and creating an activity for it. I imagine they've already achieved or are close to achieving full parity API-wise to proper Tauri desktop apps.

Another way to approach it is to wrap the web app in a webview and use Tauri for custom logic, see https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry. You'd need to teach yourself some Rust though. I'm sure you could achieve something similar with Express. The performance will be similar to using a browser so not terrible.

It uses the WebView that the underlying OS provides to render the application’s UI — this is one of the reasons why the application binaries are smaller (as compared to electron). The WRY library from the Tauri toolkit provides a unified interface to interact with WebViews provided by different operating systems. The WRY library uses the Tao crate for cross-platform window management.

I don't remember the details, and cannot find my notes on vercel/pkg. But looking at https://github.com/vercel/pkg right now I see the project has been deprecated in favour of single-executable-applications

> Standalone CLI — we haven’t worked on a standalone CLI for the new engine yet, but will absolutely have it before the v4.0 release.

This part is the most exciting to me. Given the rest of the release announcement, I'm assuming this means that it'll be built in Rust rather than embed Node. While I'm not a Rust zealot of anything, I'm very partial to not embedding Node. Particularly when it depends on using Vercel's now-abandoned pkg[1] tool.`

[1] https://github.com/vercel/pkg

The npm package called "pkg" seems to be the standard for packaging NodeJS applications

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg

Unfortunately you also need to bundle all your code into a single file for it to work, but you can use any bundler (webpack, parcel, etc) you want at least

Nodejs support for "single executable applications" is getting there - this issue below is preventing wider adoption at the moment:

"The single executable application feature currently only supports running a single embedded script using the CommonJS module system."

https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html

Should be an awesome game changer for node.js when the feature gets rounded out.

Also check out vercel's `pkg`: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1291

Yes, you can. Check out pkg for a fun option, which can package up your project and Node.js into a single executable.

Further, you could experiment with the pkg tool that allows you to package up Node JS, your source, and your dependencies into one single executable for easy distribution.

package the app using https://github.com/vercel/pkg and use a smaller base image like alpine, busybox or even scratch (if possible)

Check this thread: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1685