I see your app is MacOS only at the moment. Are you re-writing it in Electron or what? Very curious
I looked at alternatives to Electron because I wanted to avoid the bloat, but nothing felt like the right fit. Tauri (https://tauri.studio/) is the most exciting, but I couldn't find a good way to get raw video frames into the UI without a bunch of expensive copies or serialization. I also looked at native toolkits like Qt (I've worked with it in the past) but I didn't love the idea of building lots of custom UI components without the benefit of HTML + CSS. So for now it's Rust + Electron, and I'm paying extra attention to performance.
Are you referring to ease in complexity of creating components compared to the alternatives? Because I end up with the same choice when sieving frameworks to use crossplatform. But I've been looking nto Flutter recently, although it's still in beta, it has potential.
I learned Swift in order to build the Mac app, and I know from that experience that building custom UI controls while learning a new ecosystem slowed me down a lot. I didn’t love the idea of repeating that experience, and where I’m headed there’s gonna be a good bit of custom UI.
I forget the word or the link, but I think there was a "rule of thumb" thing that circulated HN about having a limited budget for taking-risks/being-bleeding-edge, and focus in spending that on differentiating properties of your projects, while the rest should stay "old and boring"
The idea of spending fewer "innovation tokens" was definitely on my mind when I was thinking through this.
It uses less CPU than any other Electron-based video apps I've seen (and even less than a few Qt-based editors I tried) and it feels snappy.
I think tools like Figma have shown what's possible when enough attention is paid to performance early on – but yeah, it's one of my main worries with going with Electron and I'm trying to avoid the downsides as much as I'm able.
The ones I have less control over are memory usage and disk space. I'd love to get those down but it seems like that'd require digging into Chromium and ripping things out. Which, honestly, I looked at doing, but that code base is a beast and I'd rather get something into peoples' hands sooner.
On a related note: I think there's a real opportunity for an "Electron Lite", like some kind of custom Electron/Chromium build that turns off stuff you don't need. I suspect it could help disk usage + memory usage + startup time. Chromium's build system has lots of flags that make it seem like you can turn things off. But it didn't work that way when I tried, so I think it probably requires source-level changes, which then means maintaining those patches across Chromium updates etc. But really, though: I don't need WebRTC, or printing, or media codecs, or probably a zillion other things. It'd be so cool to be able to turn those things off at will.
If dceddia is able to add features and fixes more quickly, that's good for users too.
And if Svelte on the desktop becomes popular, people will likely come up with more efficient options. For example, a more efficient Electron or something like "Svelte Native", which could be a good thing.
I'd love if all software were more efficient, but getting up to speed on a new platform has a huge opportunity cost too.
https://github.com/halfnelson/svelte-native
It's a Svelte renderer for NativeScript (a framework targeting iOS and Android), rather than being a port of React Native to Svelte.
This is all assuming there isn't some specific OS level requirements in your app. I know there are other video editors using WASM successfully and apps like Figma.
Working in GTK with hot reload and instantaneous esbuild rebuilds is.... insane.
My hope is that by writing most of my backend in Rust, that it'd be easy-ish to switch to Tauri or other options if something changes down the road.