Some previous discussion on SciterJS here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797423" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797423</a><p>The issue is that this isn't actually an Electron alternative; the author is upfront about this not actually being a browser-compatible rendering engine. It's just a rendering engine that happens to use some subset / superset of HTML, JS and CSS, but it is not compatible with web libraries and components.<p>As a basic example, SciterJS crashes loading the "hello world" ReactJS project (at least it did last time I tried it - the author recommended I used a custom version of React he publishes). It's perfectly fine to come up with a lightweight cross-platform UI rendering engine (we know we need more of those), but having it web-adjancent while not really web-compatible is a recipe for frustration.
I see, in this thread, talks about what Sciter does and does not offer.<p>It's not the only alternative to Electron, but it might be one that offers predictable and repeatable results.<p>I released a small open source project on HN last week (<a href="https://github.com/Fusion/pngsource" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Fusion/pngsource</a>) and I wrote its backend logic in Go. I built the frontend using Tailwind (<a href="https://tailwindcss.com" rel="nofollow">https://tailwindcss.com</a>) and DaisyUI (<a href="https://daisyui.com" rel="nofollow">https://daisyui.com</a>) and, using Go compiler flags, I can release the app using both WebView (github.com/webview/webview) (which, yes, does require the host OS' collaboration) and Wails (wails.app) (which also does.)<p>On Linux/AMD64, the binary's size is 3.7M when building for WebView, and 6.8M when targeting Wails.<p>The way the app works is I drag/drop files to the UI, magic happens, and I use github.com/ncruces/zenity to prompt the user for a save location.<p>I cross-compile the apps using xgo (<a href="https://github.com/karalabe/xgo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/karalabe/xgo</a>)<p>It's been working pretty well on Linux, Windows, MacOS. I think WebView's approach of limiting the feature set is working well as it feels more "native" than Wails (better refreshes and resize operations for instance)<p>However, I already have a few tickets reporting that, for instance, the app is displayed as a blank window in some environments. And it's hard to debug remotely, obviously. So, this is where Sciter may be a better option.
> Fabrice Bellard have created his QuickJS embeddable JS engine<p>Oh. That's the QEMU/FFMPEG Fabrice Bellard? That sounds definitely interesting. (Perhaps more than the actual article, haha.)<p><a href="https://bellard.org/quickjs/" rel="nofollow">https://bellard.org/quickjs/</a>
Since there is presumably no commercial advantage to keeping TIScript proprietary, it would be nice to open source it. It was a shame when Opera announced that they were moving to Chromium but didn't throw the Presto sources over the wall at the same time. I think we have to treat it like that code is never going to see the light of day, which is unfortunate, since even under restrictive copyright regimes, <i>eventually</i> books and movies become public domain.<p>DO:<p>- Use LGPL or GPL for TIScript, if you want; customers who need something further away from copyleft on the spectrum of open source can continue paying<p>DON'T:<p>- Equate open sourcing the code with running an open source project and all the overhead that comes along with it and then decide not to do it for that reason; throw it over the wall with a license slapped on it and don't ignore the "NO WARRANTY" section (this is the thing that 99% of GitHub projects with burned out maintainers get wrong)<p>- Get bashful about code quality and say "I need to polish it up first"; nobody cares (since Sciter has already been shared source for a while, I don't expect this to be a problem, but just trying to cover all the bases here)
I'd really like to see Sciter take off to mainstream. If I was asked to do an application with specific custom designed UI, I'd use Sciter.<p>I have given it a go some months ago, alongside with Delphi and it's really really easy to get started.<p>It's not open source yet, but... hey! it doesn't have to be to be to be successful.<p>Of course, Terra Informatica doesn't have the same level of marketing budget than Microsoft/GitHub to promote it as Electron, but a project can rise to relevance by its own merits I believe. I usually err on the side of naïvety for these cases.
So weird - I just found this out naturally when visiting the Sciter homepage last week and I didn't recall it ever being said that this would ever be done. I do remember the author's brief moment where he was considering open-sourcing it with QuickJS as the engine.<p>On the Rust side, I've been looking at Tauri, but would much prefer it be usable with something other than the host webview, like Sciter. Tauri offers a bit more of a complete API for desktop apps and it would be nice to have my cake and eat it too.
Just a bit of empathy, I can relate to your loss, c-smile. No matter how good your idea is, the crude force of “web standards best practices top frameworks wow salary” inertia can crush every noble endeavor and almost nobody will even notice it’s status quo, not the only way.
> Reference counting GC with loops detection<p>I'm interested in exploring the state of memory management in between pure ownership trees and all-out GC, including stack-allocated structs, refcounting, cycle collection, and per-thread-enabled GCs. I found <a href="https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html" rel="nofollow">https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413561" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413561</a> when looking for more information on QuickJS's cycle removal, which mentions the "Bacon cycle collector".
Related tangent: Is anyone aware of any CSS frameworks that are "native-like" and not generic web-based things?<p>E.g. if I want OS-style UI components + styles like a browser tab-strip or pane splitters or toolbars etc?<p>There are loads of things out there with UI elements, but they seem to be focused on webpage use-cases and design patterns, and so are not really suitable for desktop apps running in sciter/electron/tauri/neutralino/wails/others<p>The closest thing I know about is <a href="https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/" rel="nofollow">https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/</a> but that only has a limited control set.
Reading thru the spec for the language brought back PTSD flashbacks from doing InDesign scripting with ExtendScript <a href="https://extendscript.docsforadobe.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://extendscript.docsforadobe.dev/</a>
I have a little progressive Web app I'm currently rewriting in Vue 3. Was hoping to toss it in electron for cross platform desktop use. Now I think I'll give this a go first. Great work!
Maybe I missed it from skimming the article... How is the performance using the new JS engine compared to the previous one?<p>I seem to remember Sciter being super performant compared to regular web rendering engines.
I like this from Sciter's pitch:<p>“golden 40 seconds” rule: for the user, to buy a product, it should not take more than 40 seconds from the click on “download” button to the UI to appear on screen.