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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping for a small embeddable engine to finally replace Electron. The build on Windows ends up being 55MB, not too bad but still too large for simple apps.

Is anyone working on something like that?

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Yes, we're working on that over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz (alpha release imminent). Our TodoMVC example is current ~20mb with a standard release builds, but comes down to 7.2mb with some compiler flags like -Oz and LTO enabled (these numbers of from macOS).

And we plan to allow fine grained configuration of the feature set, so if you don't need certain image formats or layout algorithms or networking support, then you can disable them and save on binary size.

blitz is cool piece of tech but it seems that it needs dioxus framework to do any sort of interactivity which in turn needs to be written in rust. Which is a lot slower than writing a electron app.

Ohhhh...this is so awesome. Fits the most common app usecase for plain HTML+CSS rendering library and not a humongous browser for developing offline apps and its terrific that something like blitz exists.

Well, the application is basically unoptimized. However, we also don't have many components yet that can eat up your memory. But we try to keep the memory usage as low as possible. We also thought about integrating it into something like Electron, and for something like that it is important to have a low memory usage.

Lateron, we might have some compile time flags to reduce memory usage in cost of a bit of speed. Most Electron apps don't require that big oomf performance on the startup, since everything is locally and can be cached in a better way.

The smallest app built with Tauri is 500 KB.

[1]: https://tauri.app [2]: https://syntax.fm/show/821/is-tauri-the-electron-killer/tran...

There is Sciter: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk

That's now one of the goal of Servo. Also, did you look at Tauri?

Servo and Tauri still let the Application use JavaScript, which is just very wasteful. I was thinking about making it possible to write dynamic websites completely without JavaScript, by building up WASM support and making that even faster. But that's a not the goal for now. Indeed, we don't even have a JS API for websites yet...

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