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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Tauri seems like the only viable Electron alternative right now, and it's written in Rust.

It's not very clear from their docs, but it looks like tauri is mostly a way to launch a system WebView from rust and communicate with it via message passing. Doesn't really seem like a GUI toolkit for rust, since all the GUI stuff is going to be done in JS.

The same can be said of Electron.

The difference is that Electron guarantees you're always using a known version/engine. With Tauri, you'd be using whatever is installed, and that engine may behave different from what you are used to.

So basically you get all the drawbacks of developing for different web browsers, without really any of the benefits a cross-platform GUI gives you.

Just like building for the web then? In that scenario you also do not know what version the browser is (or even what kind of browser).

An advantage would be that the browser gets security patches by the OS.

Is this really a problem now that IE11 is finally being deprecated? You basically have Blink/Gecko/Webkit which is no different from regular web dev

Does it use less RAM because it's shared with the system browser? I sure as hell avoid all the Electron based apps because of their memory consumption.

Cross-browser compatibility is not too bad these days.

I did some testing using webview (https://github.com/Boscop/web-view) which is used by Tauri if I'm not mistaken. On Linux this uses webkitgtk, and it used a total of around 100 MB. That's not that good, but certainly better compared to Electron.

That's a stretch.

The most viable competitor to Electron other than Qt are the Java GUI toolkits. There are several but the two main ones are Swing (old, mature, not gonna win any prettiness awards but it gets the job done well enough in IntelliJ), and JavaFX (pretty darn good but people forget about it).

I've shipped apps using JavaFX before. It was quite a pleasant experience and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

IntelliJ is great example of Swing, which also extends into its plugin ecosystem.

If you are looking to use Java. This is very good

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

There’s also Kotlin multi platform

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