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Comment by JohannMac | Hacker News Reader

Given your destination was the Mac app, why not Swift/SwiftUI rather than Rust/Tauri? Just curious is all.

Thanks for checking it out. The goal is for Desktop Docs to be cross-platform. We've had a lot of requests for Windows support, so we chose Rust to set us up for an upcoming Windows version.

App looks great, I'm on Windows so I can't wait to see it!

Thanks! If you're interested in that version, drop us a note: hello [at] desktopdocs dot com. We'll shoot you an update when it's ready!

Have you started your windows version testing? Any issues you've seen in the differences between browsers tauri would use on the different OSs?

We haven't started testing for windows yet. Are you on Windows? Happy to let you know when we're releasing that version.

I know it’s probably still not ready for prime time, but I believe the arc browser team was building a windows runtime for swift bec they prefer to use swift everywhere.

I checked it out a while back. It still requires you to write two different UIs in two different frameworks: SwiftUI or Appkit on Mac, and WinUI on Windows. It's just that now you can write WinUI code in Swift instead of C#.

I mean I guess that makes sense as it’d be a pretty big project to port Appkit to windows APIs, but that’s not really a great benefit in terms of cross-platform development. I guess if you’re building something like a browser, you’re going so low level anyways that most of those cross-platform bells and whistles don’t provide much benefit.

I wanted to ask the same question. Swift is a fairly nice language and seems to offer many of the benefits of Rust. As another commentator asked, I am also interested in details of integrating CLIPs.

I like the narrative, BTW, on why you needed to port your app.

Thanks! Mentioned it on the other comment - but we're using the Ort crate in rust and bunlding onnxruntime with the app. Definitely considered Swift and I know it's gotten a lot better since I last used it, but cross-platform support was what got us to use Rust over Swift.

As far as porting over goes, we are much happier maintaining the new version.

Curious as well. I’m planning to build a desktop app, haven’t use swift for a long time and I’m pretty new to rust. Tauri looks very promising. I really don’t like electron apps. They’re so slow to start even on lightning fast machines. Thanks for any insights!

After our Electron experience, I wish I had moved out of my comfort zone (JS) sooner. Electron just requires a lot of optimization and you have to be really tight with your imports to avoid loading things you don't immediately need.

The smaller bundle size with Tauri and blazing speed are well worth the effort.

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