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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

You say that, but there's a lot of pushback against the electron apps for a while now. Tauri improves on that only a little bit. I'm going to go out of my way and lose some features happily is it means I'm using a native app these days, and I know other people do as well.

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That pushback is localised to informed people (typically developers) not the public at large. They're using Electron Apps all day.

I’m a developer and I’m also using web apps or electron apps all day.

VS Code, Slack, Spotify, GitHub (for basic pre commit diff review I quite like their app), and figma are all Electron apps and are pretty good today.

So many web apps that I can’t count and many of them are passable. Still the Electron apps tend to be more polished (even their web versions).

I am so glad that Electron makes must haves for me like Signal possible.

Electron apps are great themselves. It’s when you are in a 3rd world country where all computers are old or when you are working on an underpowered machine it becomes a problem. Spawning a new browser process consumes resources like there is no tomorrow or other programs running simultaneously. This is the problem Tauri addresses.

Then that means we need to do a better job of informing the public about how wasteful our industry is being of their computers and, indirectly, their money. To do otherwise, to keep them in the dark, is disrespectful. My hypothesis is that once non-developers are informed, they'll care. They probably already feel that something is wrong but can't articulate it, and have perhaps resigned themselves to a crappy experience.

Developers can point at the issue. The less informed say "my computer is getting old" or "can you clean my laptop so it works faster". We're able to say "5 simple apps taking 24GB of ram is absurd".

> I'm going to go out of my way and lose some features happily is it means I'm using a native app these days, and I know other people do as well.

People say this all the time, but in the real world, whether or not an app is native matters very little compared to everything else about it: features/content, design/UX, etc. And if using web technologies lets you build the app, say, twice as quickly, that means it will have that many more features or be that much more polished than the hypothetical native version, and that could mean the difference between having actual users and not having an app in the first place.

How do you feel about react native?

As a career mobile developer I honestly can't tell the difference between a well made react native app and a true native app

React is a terrible patchwork of a solution, which literally doubles the UI logic and work needed to get it performant. But it works, it solves the issue of being straight-forward to make platform agnostic by following tutorials.

I don't see any other way to go trully multi platform without making separate UI for Android and iOS. Or if you are going desktop, without using a platform agnostic graphics engine like something on top of OpenGL/Vulcan (which, v8 under electron is. A platform agnostic graphics engine). But, you are never going to get the native feeling/snapiness, because you are literally placing a canvas (your, multiplatfom app), on top of another canvas (Native UI engine of your platform)

IMO, if you want to build a service for someone, which carries some actual, real world utillity. And you can sell it to someone. You can't go wrong with a WebPageRenderer like Electron and some frameworks if choice underneath. This way, you can easily let the customer in on the joke from whatever device they are comfortable with. And only if you are working with a tool for pro IT or you are well funded, go for experimentation with faster UI. And even then it is not a rule, of which examples are VSCode & intelliJ dev tools. Both built on top of JS & Java platforms, both hindering their true potential like a stone tied the scrotum...

Great reply. That last sentence was pure art.

> I don't see any other way to go trully multi platform without making separate UI for Android and iOS.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Isn't that because React Native literally uses native components? It's not like Flutter which renders its own UI.

It's not about how well made it looks, or if I can tell a difference. It's: can I run a browser, Slack, Spotify, etc." at the same time without swapping. Turns out on a modern machine with a few Electron / Tauri / other apps running, the answer is no.

The entire point of Tauri is to not spawn another browser process for every other app, and thus be able to run many apps simultaneously as easily as running many websites simultaneously. I think you misgeneralized here.

This helps with the binary size, but not memory usage. You still effectively need the browser initialised in your process. See their own memory benchmarks: https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/#memory-usage - it's basically in the same range as electron.

I think you’re mistaken. Electron apps bundle a specific version of the browser with themselves (which often doesn’t match the user’s version), thus loading up to twice amount of libraries and all the dependencies. This increases memory usage. Also the linked benchmark shows Tauri uses significantly less memory than Electron. 540MB vs 270MB in best test cases.

370 not 270. In the other test it loses, so it's not really conclusive.

It's true you have to load up more code for electron, but not everything in the chrome package is code and lots of it gets mmapped anyway. A large part of the memory usage for the electron/Tauri apps is the chrome heap and loaded app resources - that doesn't get deduplicated. An empty chrome (just started with no tabs or extensions) uses 350MB of RSS memory for me. That's going to be slightly lower for electron, but that value will be the lower bound for every single electron process started.

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