Muon: GPU Based Electron on a Diet

• tauri

  470 77,588 9.8 Rust

  Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

  

While I'm always excited to see Electron alternatives, they all try to address the same issues and fall short on the exact same areas.

Yes, Electron eats a lot of resources and generates big distributables. I would love to give my users snappier and lighter desktop applications while still being able to build them with front-end web tech. On the other hand, what keeps attracting me to Electron is how feature complete and well documented it is. I tried many alternatives but there is always a point where I can't do something because the API is missing.

I wish all Electron alternatives would join their efforts to make one good framework that can compete, not only in terms of performance, but features too.

So far, I've been working with Tauri[0] for a small project and found it to be working really well despite missing a few features that I needed (and that Electron has). I have high hopes that Tauri will become the best Electron alternative out there and to use it for all my future desktop projects.

[0] https://tauri.app/

• Ultralight

  53 4,598 2.9 CMake

  Lightweight, high-performance HTML renderer for game and app developers.

  

I do care, and in your example, it depends on what license the project uses and how "proprietary_library" is distributed.

In this specific case, Muon cannot be GPL'ed, for example, because it distributes a copy of Ultralight [1] and Ultralight has a proprietary (incompatible) license [2]. For a license like MIT or BSD, I think applying that license is technically valid, bug again, not very practical. I doubt Muon would make it into the OpenBSD repos, for example. Its distribution is hindered by the depedency.

[1] https://github.com/ImVexed/muon/tree/master/ultralight

[2] https://github.com/ultralight-ux/Ultralight/blob/master/lice...

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• muon

  7 2,828 0.0 C

  GPU based Electron on a diet

I do care, and in your example, it depends on what license the project uses and how "proprietary_library" is distributed.

In this specific case, Muon cannot be GPL'ed, for example, because it distributes a copy of Ultralight [1] and Ultralight has a proprietary (incompatible) license [2]. For a license like MIT or BSD, I think applying that license is technically valid, bug again, not very practical. I doubt Muon would make it into the OpenBSD repos, for example. Its distribution is hindered by the depedency.

[1] https://github.com/ImVexed/muon/tree/master/ultralight

[2] https://github.com/ultralight-ux/Ultralight/blob/master/lice...

• nw.js

  58 40,119 9.1 JavaScript

  Call all Node.js modules directly from DOM/WebWorker and enable a new way of writing applications with all Web technologies.

  

As others have said, Tauri is exactly the same sort of tool, sorry if the mention of Rust threw you off!

Some more:

https://wails.app

https://nwjs.io/

• Ultralight-API

  1 60 0.8 C

  C/C++ API Headers for Ultralight

  

Yes-- Ultralight (the renderer underneath) has two modes: pure-CPU or pure-GPU. The GPU renderer does all drawing on the GPU using tesselated path geometry and pixel shaders.

All painting is actually emitted as virtual GPU draw calls, interface is here: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/Ultralight-API/blob/master/...

Platform-specific implementations (D3D11 / D3D12 / Metal / OpenGL) are provided in the AppCore repo: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/AppCore

• AppCore

  1 77 3.2 C

  Cross-platform app runtime module for Ultralight

  

Yes-- Ultralight (the renderer underneath) has two modes: pure-CPU or pure-GPU. The GPU renderer does all drawing on the GPU using tesselated path geometry and pixel shaders.

All painting is actually emitted as virtual GPU draw calls, interface is here: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/Ultralight-API/blob/master/...

Platform-specific implementations (D3D11 / D3D12 / Metal / OpenGL) are provided in the AppCore repo: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/AppCore

• WebCore

  1 208 2.9 C++

  WebCore Module. This module is a fork of WebKit's WebCore module and is responsible for all parsing, styling, layout, script execution, and page state.

  

WebKit is BSD but has sub-modules with LGPL code (specifically WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and WTF).

Ultralight is not WebKit (we have a totally different API and use our own renderer, compositor, and event-management code) but we do use a fork of WebCore and JavaScriptCore.

Our fork of WebCore is available under LGPL here: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/WebCore

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• tamagui

  55 10,083 10.0 TypeScript

  Style React fast with 100% parity on React Native, an optional UI kit, and optimizing compiler.

  

Adam, we hung way back I was working on an on device search tool called Orbit that could’ve used Ultralight, I think at bespoke. Been keeping tabs on it since, congrats on the release.

The steps WebKit have made the last few years have been incredible and your further parallelization and optimization work would be so slick, can’t wait to try it out.

I’d love to use it with Tamagui and Vite running all bundling for RN. Silky smooth desktop app, web apps, sites, and mobile apps all easy to design together and deploy nicely to their respective platforms.

https://tamagui.dev

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