wry VS Rustler

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.

For performance intensive tasks, you could rely on Rust NIFs, there is this great project: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

My last project with Elixir was using Elixir merely as an orchestrator of static binaries (developed in golang) which were talking in JSON via stdin/stdout.

From the moment we discovered Tauri, we really felt like this was the perfect fit. The API is really solid, the configuration files are minimal and easy to understand, and the usage of Rust makes it way easier to add new functionalities and think about interesting ways of interoperating with Elixir via the Rustler library.

Elixir/Rust is the new Python/C++, and Rustler makes the communicating between the 2 languages super easy: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

Rustler is so awesome for this. Write Elixir NIFs in Rust? Yes, please!

But really, I would suggest thinking about what you want to build before "how" or "with which tool" - one of the signs of a person becoming a good engineer is having an array of tools at their disposal and being able to choose a correct tool for the correct task. Rust also excels in integrating with other languages - with JS via WebAssembly (a bit of self-promotion, for example), with Elixir via Rustler, with Python via PyO3 and PyOxidizer, etc. So you absolutely can start writing a frontend app with JS, or a distributed system with Elixir, or a data processing/ML app with Python and use Rust to speed up critical parts of those. Or, in reverse, you can start with Rust & add new capabilities to whatever you're building, that being a frontend, a resilient chat interface, or an ML model.

I created a elixir (wrapper) library to generate password hashes. Other Elixir libraries use a C NIF to generate password hashes. This libary uses a Rust NIF (using Rustler) and the Rust libraries the generate the different hashes. Additionally this library uses RustlerPrecompiled so you don't need to have a Rust compiler installed to use this library. It supports argon2, scrypt, brypt and pbkdf2.

> I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language?

Because Rust brings none of the benefits of the BEAM ecosystem to the table.

I was an early Elixir adopter, not working currently as an Elixir developer, but I have deployed one of the largest Elixir applications for a private company in my country.

I know it has limits, but the language itself is only a small part of the whole.

Take ML, Jose Valim and Sean Moriarity have studied the problem, made a plan to tackle it and started solving it piece by piece [1] in a tightly integrated manner, it feels natural, as if Elixir always had those capabilities in a way that no other language does and to put the icing on the cake the community released Livebook [2] to interactively explore code and use the new tools in the simplest way possible, something that Python notebooks only dream of being capable of, after a decade of progress

That's not to say that Elixir is superior as a language, but that the ecosystem is flourishing and the community is able to extract the 100% of the benefits from the tools and create new marvellously crafted ones, that push the limits forward every time, in such a simple manner, that it looks like magic.

And going back to Rust, you can write Rust if you need speed or for whatever reason you feel it's the right tool for the job, it's totally integrated [3][4], again in a way that many other languages can only dream of, and it's in fact the reason I've learned Rust in the first place.

The opposite is not true, if you write Rust, you write Rust, and that's it. You can't take advantage of the many features the BEAM offers, OTP, hot code reloading, full inspection of running systems, distribution, scalability, fault tolerance, soft real time etc. etc. etc.

But of course if you don't see any advantage in them, it means you probably don't need them (one other option is that you still don't know you want them :] ). In that case Rust is as good as any other language, but for a backend, even though I gently despise it, Java (or Kotlin) might be a better option.

[1] https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon

[2] https://livebook.dev/

[3] https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

[4] https://dashbit.co/blog/rustler-precompiled

unfortunately as of the time of this writing, rustler does not support generic type intefaces so I guess this is impossible?

One thing that drew me to Rust was actually Elixir/Erlang calling out to it for certain specialized needs. Within Elixir/Erlang you get best of breed concurrency but exiting the BEAM to run other code is unsafe. Calling out to Rust, however, comes with great safety guarantees.

Managing concurrency outside of Rust and then calling Rust for the more focused and specialized work is a good combination IMO.

https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler