web-to-desktop-framework-comparison

Seems pretty sensible! I always wonder how those established Electron codebases would map over to something that uses the system specific WebViews and how broken (or not) those would prove to be: https://wails.io https://tauri.app But admittedly that would just decrease the bundle size while doing not much for the performance or resource usage: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... so maybe not super relevant to this particular discussion.

My current project uses Wails and a previous one used Tauri. I like Tauri a bit more but not enough to justify porting Go code to Rust. The primary difference I run into is how the JS <-> native interface is exposed, but this is very minor. Tauri is much slower to build, I think this is just the nature of Rust though. Stats here. [1] 1. https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

Here's a great comparison, updated two weeks ago. https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... Electron comes out looking competitive at runtime! IMO people over-fixate on disc space instead of runtime memory usage. Memory Usage with a single window open (Release builds) Windows (x64): 1. Electron: ≈93MB 2. NodeGui: ≈116MB 3. NW.JS: ≈131MB 4. Tauri: ≈154MB 5. Wails: ≈163MB 6. Neutralino: ≈282MB MacOS (arm64): 1. NodeGui: ≈84MB 2. Wails: ≈85MB 3. Tauri: ≈86MB 4. Neutralino: ≈109MB 5. Electron: ≈121MB 6. NW.JS: ≈189MB Linux (x64): 1. Tauri: ≈16MB 2. Electron: ≈70MB 3. Wails: ≈86MB 4. NodeGui: ≈109MB 5. NW.JS: ≈166MB 6. Neutralino: ≈402MB

> it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world. I think that projects that ship packaged web apps but attempt to use the system native web views where available are really nice, like Wails: https://wails.io/ (so for example, on Windows it would use Webview2, so you don't have to package an entire Chromium install yourself) Here's a comparison of how the distribution sizes change, Wails in particular also has way faster builds than something like Tauri: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... That said, I wish we got more native software, or even something like LCL that can target Win32, GTK, Qt or whatever else is available. Sure, writing components that are available on a lot of platforms and work similarly everywhere is a pain for the developers, but I applaud the effort regardless, since the above

> That does help with the app sizes quite a bit: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... Interesting resource, thanks! Was not expecting the start up values for Tauri, they're abysmal ._. Welp, at least the executables are small.

I mean, most OSes already ship with a WebView component that you can use instead of shipping an entire browser runtime. Wails does that: https://wails.io/ Tauri also does that: https://tauri.app/ That does help with the app sizes quite a bit: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... Sadly it doesn’t change the memory usage much so the technology is still inherently wasteful, but on a certain level it feels like a lost battle - because web technologies often feel like the choice of least resistance when you want GUI software that will run on a bunch of platforms while not being annoying to develop (from the perspective of your run of the mill dev).

Why is this better than just using Dart/Flutter? The introduction docs also claim "In Electron and NWjs, you have to install Node.js and hundreds of dependency libraries. Embedded Chromium and Node make simple apps bloaty. Neutralinojs offers a lightweight and portable SDK which is an alternative for Electron and NW.js." Yet the installation here starts with NPM and depends on Node. Sorry, but I don't see a significant difference between this and Electron just from the comparison chart linked in the docs. https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... Save for the fact that Neutralinojs is not listed as having any support for automated testing where Electron does. The data there shows smaller and faster builds on empty apps but that doesn't count for much since no one ships empty apps. Needs a fair comparison against its

not for nothing... but from their comparison chart, it looks like .Net Maui is the better option: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

I looked into some alternatives a while back [1] and thought Neutralino looked promising except that it doesn't support node modules. I.e. you cannot use the existing ecosystem of node-stuff. Still, glad there are many options for using web UI to create desktop apps these days. [1]: Neutralino themselves link to this nice comparison table: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

They link a comparison: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... By those numbers it compares remarkably will against Tauri.

and https://neutralino.js.org/ Their exciting part is > You can extend Neutralinojs with any programming language (via extensions IPC) and use Neutralinojs as a part of any source file (via child processes IPC). still: > Neutralinojs doesn't bundle Chromium and uses the existing web browser library in the operating system (Eg: gtk-webkit2 on Linux). Neutralinojs implements a WebSocket connection for native operations and embeds a static web server to serve the web content. Comparison with Electron, Tauri and more: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

> but it uses your system's existing browser According to (1) that is incorrect. It uses WebKitGTK+. (1) https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...