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Comment by sillyboi | Hacker News Reader

It would be great to see an up-to-date benchmark comparing modern cross-platform frameworks like Tauri, Flutter, Electron, React Native, and others.

Key metrics could include:

- Target bundle size

- Memory usage (RAM)

- Startup time

- CPU consumption under load

- Disk usage

- e.t.c.

Additionally, for frameworks like Tauri, it would be useful to include a WebView compatibility matrix, since the rendering behavior and performance can vary significantly depending on the WebView version used on each platform (e.g., macOS WKWebView vs. Windows WebView2, or Linux GTK WebKit). This divergence can affect both UI fidelity and performance, so capturing those differences in a visual format or table could help developers make more informed choices.

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Here's a great comparison, updated two weeks ago. https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

Electron comes out looking competitive at runtime! IMO people over-fixate on disc space instead of runtime memory usage.

Memory Usage with a single window open (Release builds)

Windows (x64): 1. Electron: ≈93MB 2. NodeGui: ≈116MB 3. NW.JS: ≈131MB 4. Tauri: ≈154MB 5. Wails: ≈163MB 6. Neutralino: ≈282MB

MacOS (arm64): 1. NodeGui: ≈84MB 2. Wails: ≈85MB 3. Tauri: ≈86MB 4. Neutralino: ≈109MB 5. Electron: ≈121MB 6. NW.JS: ≈189MB

Linux (x64): 1. Tauri: ≈16MB 2. Electron: ≈70MB 3. Wails: ≈86MB 4. NodeGui: ≈109MB 5. NW.JS: ≈166MB 6. Neutralino: ≈402MB

The benchmark also says Tauri takes 25s to launch on Linux and build of empty app takes over 4 minutes on Windows. Not sure if those numbers are really correct.

This. Reminds me of Casey Muratori warning people to not trust benchmarks made by random people on the internet.

There’s absolutely no way Tauri apps take 25s to launch. Source: I’ve played with Tauri on Linux. This is an order of magnitude off.

A few months ago, I experimented with Wails and Tauri on Windows. The builds did indeed take unreasonably long with the Rust option and were way faster with Go, no idea why but I ditched Tauri because of that since Wails did more or less the same thing.

Did you manage to publish/ship your WAILS app? What was your biggest hurdle with it?

It was an internal app, a GUI to configure a CLI tool in a user friendly manner. For that use case, I essentially built a local SPA with Vue that can also call some endpoints on server side software that we also host. There, the rendering differences between the web views didn't really matter but the small distribution size was a major boon, plus being able to interface with Go code was really pleasant (as is that whole toolchain). No complaints so far, then again, not a use case where polish would matter that much.

I'd say that the biggest hurdle for that sort of thing is just the documentation or examples of how to do things online - because Electron is the one everyone seems to use and has the most collective knowledge out there.

That seems like a perfect use case for a WAILS app, nicely done!

I wonder the reason Tauri does great in Linux and Electron is at its worst is because of Optimization or lack thereof respectively.

I've compared block editors (Notion - Electron, Appflowy - Flutter , etc) to my Qt C++ & QML block editor I've built in my blog post[1] using similar parameters. You might find it a good read.

[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

I'd love to see a comparison like this.

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