Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI

This looks nice !<p>However... &quot;Low CPU and memory footprint (...) memory usage is under 20 MB for a Hello World program&quot; : I am the only one who still thinks this is huge ? (-&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonsky.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;disenchantment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonsky.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;disenchantment</a> )

Looks really good! At first glance, this seems like probably the best Electron alternative I&#x27;ve seen posted on HN.<p>Apart from the consistent GUI layer, I think an underrated reason that many teams stick with Electron is the mature tooling for cross-platform builds and upgrades. It&#x27;s pretty painful to DIY.<p>It looks like NodeGUI doesn&#x27;t currently support cross-compilation--is that something that&#x27;s on the roadmap? How about upgrade&#x2F;auto-upgrade tooling? Code signing?

I&#x27;m seeing a lot of Qt vs. Chromium in this thread. Here&#x27;s your mindblown.gif of the day: Chromium is based off Webkit which is based off KDE which is based off Qt. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;KHTML" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;KHTML</a>

Just thought it was worth mentioning that nodegui is a node &amp; qt runtime. There are framework components for not just Svelte, but React and Vue as well... just search on github if you prefer a different framework.

Maintainer here – Happy to answer any questions!

&gt; core set of platform agnostic native widgets<p>This is confusing for me. I think such a framework is either &#x27;platform agnostic&#x27; OR &#x27;native&#x27;. Maybe the API is platform agnostic and the rendering is done natively?

Looks very slick, but I am extremely stressed out by the inconsistent font sizes and button spacing across platforms in the example calculator app.

I&#x27;m always a bit surprised there was the space for Electron to exist in the first place. Since most operating systems have widget toolkits that have browsers effectively embedded into them.<p>What I would have liked to have seen instead of Electron would have been a shim API that abstracted OSX&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;WinForms&#x2F;QT webviews, and for those webviews to have a working API that would allow DOM manipulation, and allowed native sub-views to be inserted as block elements.

Same demo in VanilaJS and Sciter.JS : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;c-smile&#x2F;sciter-js-sdk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;c-smile&#x2F;sciter-js-sdk</a> (see screenshots there).<p>Binary is ~5MB, and that is HTML&#x2F;CSS + QuickJS + NodeJS runtime.<p>Versus 50MB+ of NodeGUI that is Node.JS + QT.<p>And SvelteJS works in Sciter.JS out of the box too.

Is there a way to have some small application that talks to the machine via a set of HTTP apis?<p>I envision something where you can just use your regular web app, have the user install the &quot;Desktop Connector&quot; which would be listening at say, port 8000 - then your web app can talk to the desktop via those APIs, instead of installing an Electron or related.<p>I must be missing&#x2F;forgetting something crucial since that seems like the most straightforward solution imaginable.

Very cool, I&#x27;ve been following React-NodeGUI for about a year now and I love Svelte.<p>I especially love the idea of Svelte (compiling to imperative JavaScript code), but since it&#x27;s technically a &quot;superset&quot; of JavaScript, IDE support has been an issue for me. Also I&#x27;ve cut my teeth trying to find a solid UI component library. These two things have restricted my use of the framework to smaller projects.<p>Anyone have any suggestions?

I&#x27;ve been following react-nodegui since it was announced and I really like it. In terms of memory usage it&#x27;s the cat&#x27;s meow; now there&#x27;s a question of adoption and component &#x2F; UI libraries for the ecosystem.<p>Perhaps a way to bootstrap that would be to align closer to react-native; at that point, we could use (js) components and libraries from react-native land.<p>The QT licensing question is also somewhat iffy; you need to put front and center what that implies for users of your library (do they need to open source their use of react-nodegui by extension of QT&#x27;s licensing requirements for example).

It would be nice to have the ability to weave in WebViews with the native UI. I see this lib but it&#x27;s still marked as WIP: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodegui&#x2F;nodegui-plugin-webview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodegui&#x2F;nodegui-plugin-webview</a>

Styling with CSS is interesting.

Would it be possible to use Deno for JS runtime? That should add some sandboxing limitations for apps.

Is there any electron like framework which uses the native webview libraries (webkit etc) instead of shipping their whole browser for each application?

Something similar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kdab.com&#x2F;declarative-widgets&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kdab.com&#x2F;declarative-widgets&#x2F;</a>

I think Flutter Desktop is also a good alternative to Electron

Will wait for MAUI.

How is it &quot;light&quot; weight?<p>&gt; Low CPU and memory footprint. Current CPU stays at 0% on idle and memory usage is under 20mb for a hello world program.<p>20MB!

how about deno?

How do you deal with zero day vulnerabilities? To me the biggest concern using browser-as-a-desktop solution is that there will be quite a lag between when Chrome patches zero days vs when it gets released.<p>ex) nw.js, electron.

Calculator demo doesn&#x27;t run, makes some cmake errors.

So is it Chromium-based or not? &quot;which makes it CPU- and memory-efficient when compared to other Chromium-based solutions like Electron&quot;