Consider Tauri instead of Electron

📜 Archive 🌱 Development
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It’s still quite early days, but Tauri is shaping up to be a very strong contender to Electron. I’m not part of their team, just an enthusiast.

Tauri is written in Rust and based on (and increasingly collaborating directly with-) webview.

Comparison between Tauri and Electron

Tauri Electron
Binary Size MacOS 0.6 MB 47.7 MB
Memory Consumption MacOS 13 MB 34.1 MB
Interface Service Provider Varies Chromium
Backend Binding Rust Node.js (ECMAScript)
Underlying Engine C/C++ V8 (C/C++)
FLOSS Yes No
Multithreading Yes No
Bytecode Delivery Yes No
Can Render PDF Yes No
Multiple Windows Soon Yes
GPU Access Yes Yes
Auto Updater Soon Yes (1)
Cross Platform Yes Yes
Custom App Icon Yes Yes
Windows Binary Yes Yes
MacOS Binary Yes Yes
Linux Binary Yes Yes
iOS Binary Soon No
Android Binary Soon No
Localhost Server Yes Yes
No localhost option Yes No
Desktop Tray Soon No

Notes

  1. Electron has no native auto updater on Linux, but is offered by electron-packager
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Interesting, thanks! /cc @rudolfs @xla

The focus on security is particularly interesting to us.

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@abbey @cloudhead I like their roadmap on their homepage. I think we should do something similar

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I like the idea of using some alternative to electron in general, but I wonder how we could fit the additional work into our current plan of execution.

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This table is not correct. Electron is FLOSS, and node has threads (in the form of workers).

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@erlend_sh had a little Tauri test drive today. Will have to put in a bit more work to properly evaluate whether it satisfies our needs, but so far looks quite promising.

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Very cool! I pinged them about this :slight_smile:

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These are the synapses I like to see taking place in the community. Way cool.

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