I like Tauri and the fact that it's written in Rust, but I do wonder just how tiny these apps are when it's still using webviews, even if they're system webviews and not Chrome instances like Electron. I would have liked to see something more akin to a native rendering framework like Flutter (native as in bare metal, non webviews, not native as in native OS elements).<p>However, it does seem quite hard to do if there's not a dedicated team just for developing such a GUI framework. raphlinus [0] has some great knowledge about this that I've read from his blog posts, such as his most recent one, <i>Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs</i> [2]. In my opinion, the Flutter-like approach is the way to go if you want to get good performance without webviews, have a consistent user experience across platforms, and be able to write once and deploy everywhere.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raphlinus" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raphlinus</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297653" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297653</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846</a>
I've ported a couple of small to medium sized electron apps to Tauri with moderate success.<p>The documentation is still a bit lacking, otherwise I think it'd have gone much easier.<p>On the positive side, their memory footprint has indeed decreased by hundreds of MB, in one case from 1.6GB average down to 72MB average.
I am using Tauri + Preact [0] for a private project. It's wonderful.
With Preact + htm [1], I can have a really complex UI, that still feels snappy, without having to deal with webpack or any other build pipeline (after all, it is a hobby project and therefore should spark joy).<p>The backend is entirely written in Rust.<p>I did some electron apps before, and I have to say, Tauri really feels snappier.<p>[0] <a href="https://preactjs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://preactjs.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/developit/htm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/developit/htm</a>
Svelte was a curious omission, given its excellent performance and simplicity.<p>Edit:<p>Ah, Svelte is supported, just omitted from the HN title: <a href="https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/dev/tooling/cli/templates/plugin/with-api/examples/svelte-app" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/dev/tooling/cli/tem...</a>
In addition to React/Vue, you have the ability to use Rust client-side frameworks such as Yew[0] or seed[1] for a truly full-stack Rust experience. I've been using Tauri + Yew to build an cross-platform app (shameless plug: [2]) and it's been a pleasure. There are some rough edges, but most of those have been due to platform specific issues (notifications, Windows vs Unix paths, etc.) and not Tauri/Yew itself.<p>[0] <a href="https://yew.rs/" rel="nofollow">https://yew.rs/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/seed-rs/seed" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/seed-rs/seed</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass</a> - Create your own personal search engine by crawling & indexing files/docs/websites that you want.