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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

It's Electron. That is why.

Maybe ask yourself why people chose to use Electron. The cross platform alternatives (Tauri[1] pops to mind) generally offer a more complex development experience. As long as web languages remain the lowest entrypoint they will remain the dominent force, even if they're less performant.

1: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

You're absolutely right. I tried building Upscayl with Tauri initially, but after a few days I had to give up because I was trading my time for bundle size. Then I tried Neutralino only to discover that it does not support node runtime. With Electron, we were able to focus on the core features and ship Upscayl very fast.

Since electron is also the only framework that supports node modules, it was pretty much the best low-resistance path for us at the moment.

I do wanna learn Rust eventually but that is an adventure for another day :)

As someone venturing in Tauri as primarily a web dev, I can relate to this so much. Rust is great and Tauri has some stellar benefits, but until you really master the borrow mechanics, it slows you down so much.

You deserve credit for this tool. I used it on a 35mm slide taken in 1982 that was scanned using a Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 9000 ED. The original image was around 4000x3000 pixels. I ran it through and resized it back down and it's impressively better.

The binary at 160MB ran flawlessly on a HP Dev One laptop with Debian sid and processed the image in about 10 minutes. The difference is remarkable.

You have done a brilliant job of getting a simple front end on top of a huge pile of complicated under the hood by doing the smart thing: using your time efficiently so you can focus on the hard parts of the puzzle.

If Rust is too much of an adventure, maybe you'll find Go easier. Wails [1] is great if perhaps a bit more rough round the edges. Because it's go, package sizes are 10mb+ but nothing like Electron 30mb+

1. https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

?? how is tauri a response to electron criticism? Imho the main criticism of electron is a criticism of using a webview for a desktop application where you could've used something far more simple. An alternative which would make electron critics be happy would be more like imgui or bindings to plateform native ui toolkits, but definitely not some other html ui framework.

Oh you're right. I was thinking Tauri was a cross-platform native UI kit. Imgui seems interesting but given it requires C++ knowledge that introduces all sorts of lifecycle issues regarding memory safety, etc, which makes it even more intimidating to newer SWEs.

ImGui does have a bunch of wrappers in different languages. [1]

That said, native-ish interface would feel better IMO. I always appreciate applications that “feel native”. Qt and Python's Toga [2] are a couple libraries that pop up in my mind.

[1]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Bindings

[2]: https://beeware.org/project/projects/libraries/toga/

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