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Comment by harikb | Hacker News Reader

I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.

A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.

Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.

[1] https://wails.io/

Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!

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I've looked into Tauri and Wails, but they don't seem realistic for a cross-platform app with wide distribution across multiple platforms and platform versions.

One of Electron's main selling points is that you control the browser version. Anything that relies on the system web view (like Tauri and Wails) will either force you to aggressively drop support for out-of-date OS versions, or constantly check caniuse.com and ship polyfills like you're writing a normal web app. It also forces you to test CSS that touches form controls or window chrome on every supported major version of every browser, which is just a huge pain. And you'll inevitably run into bugs with the native -> web glue that you wouldn't hit with Electron.

It is absolutely wasteful to ship a copy of Chrome with every desktop app, but Tauri/Wails don't seem like viable alternatives at the moment. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any popular commercial apps using them, so I imagine others have come to the same conclusion.

If the web-interface of a website can serve same HTML to all browsers, these UI can as well. I don't think we have IE6 level incompatibility these days. I have no idea what specific incompatibility you are talking about. I am writing my 4th desktop app since early 2025.

But sure, you could have some specific need, but I find it hard to believe for these simple apps.

Yes, but most people don’t do that. Companies are optimizing to ship features fast, not trying to min/max resource usage when majority don’t care.

This is a new era where “if it works more or less well, ux/dx is fine, let’s ship it” has more moat than ever. Everything else is really secondary.

I am in love with wails. having python and JS background with no go experience. I pm'ed Ai agents to create a fairly complex desktop app for my own use. it is day and night in terms of performance compared to lightest electron app.

Wails is pretty good. I wrote a couple of apps but since I'm on macOS I ended up rewriting them in SwiftUI and that's much lighter of course since it uses all native APIs.

Wow Wails looks interesting! Hadn't heard of it before.

Interesting. Does the Wails renderer support the full set of what Webkit/Chromium supports?

It just uses the system web view, so it depends on the user's platform/version.

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