web-to-desktop-framework-comparison

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).