lorca

I just liked the content.. I can't answer the rest of the speculation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Have you tried Lorca[0]? A wails that assumes you have chrome installed (as most do) so: much smaller binaries. [0]: https://github.com/zserge/lorca [1]: https://wails.io/

I suggest to take a look at tauri[1], lorca[2](requires chrome to be installed) or webview[3](uses system webkit). If you're interested I made a small poc that can be shipped as a single binary file with webview and react - https://github.com/snehesht/goview 1. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri 2. https://github.com/zserge/lorca 3. https://github.com/webview/webview

Carlo [1] was an exciting project to hear, sad that it's no longer maintained. Glad to see Lorca [2] as a spiritual successor. [1] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo/ [2] https://github.com/zserge/lorca

Google had a project called Carlo to do this: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo But it's been discontinued now that the devs left the company. I also see this project but you have to write Go to talk to the OS, not Node: https://github.com/zserge/lorca

Finally getting back to webview[1] and lorca[2], but also made a toy chess engine[3] today. [1]: https://github.com/zserge/webview [2]: https://github.com/zserge/lorca [3]: https://github.com/zserge/carnatus

I doubt flutter will be significantly leaner for real world, full featured apps, like slack. After all flutter is reusing Chrome's building blocks, with Skia and many other render related libraries, with similar IPC architecture for security, etc. They've replaced the js run-time with dart. See download sizes here [1], if they remind you electron app sizes [2], it's because flutter is a slimmer (not by much) Chrome. Flutter will suffer from huge update sizes like electron, but may be faster out of the box, and slimmer (not by much) in RAM. However, using Carlo [3] or Lorca [4] can yield similar benefits, without learning dart, or dealing with brand new flutter edge cases solved years ago elsewhere. In my opinion, flutter is not yet a better mouse trap for desktop apps, and even for mobile, ionic 4 is plenty performant [1]: https://github.

Alternatives: 1. Webview: https://github.com/zserge/webview 2. Lorca (Chrome): https://github.com/zserge/lorca 3. Carlo (js/Chrome): https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

> The following options exists but were not included because they are not mature enough. > Web broswer communicating with a Rust local server: too much hacky, insecure? (DNS rebinding attacks) and does not support native features like tray icons. You should not discount this, Golang solutions like lorca [0] do just fine with this using devtools proto for comm (systray can be a separate lib). DNS rebinding attacks are just a host header check away from mitigated. At the least, check out webview [1] (and its in-dev successor impl [2]) for not requiring Chrome and having more direct control. Also, you should look at CEF which ships with Chromium bundled (it's not too huge) and has a C-FFI easily consumable from Rust. I have used this approach with success. 0 - https://github.com/zserge/lorca 1 - https://github.com/zserge/webview 2 - https://

Flutter's memory use is between 80-100MB??!! That's just as much as Carlo [1] or Lorca [2], that use Chrome as the front end! This is NOT what I expected, and certainly not in line with the "lean, performant" GUI marketing that flutter claims [1]: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo [2]: https://github.com/zserge/lorca

Do I want lorca[1] or fyne? I know that they are different, but which one would you go with and why? [1] https://github.com/zserge/lorca

Regarding Go / Browser interaction sI've stumbled on two libs : https://github.com/zserge/lorca to integrate chrome as a UI (smaller than electron apparently) and https://github.com/zserge/webview (not tested myself and the second one is rewritten currently)

I've seen a day ago a recording of a presentation from last week FOSDEM where two other libraries, Lorca[0] (Go + HTML5) and Webview[1] (C++/C/Go), were described that are similar in scope to this one. From the webview project page: It supports two-way JavaScript bindings (to call JavaScript from C/C++/Go and to call C/C++/Go from JavaScript). It uses Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and MSHTML (IE10/11) on Windows. [0]https://github.com/zserge/lorca [1]https://github.com/zserge/webview edit: the link to the video https://video.fosdem.org/2019/UD2.120/godesktopapps.webm and the presentation slides https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/godesktopapps/attachm...

The way this works: that the program locates chrome executable, launches it in a special mode, chrome prints which port it allocated for that instance to stdout, the program parses stdout to find the port and opens websocket connection. See: https://github.com/zserge/lorca/blob/master/chrome.go#L50 How would that be intercepted? Only the program that launches that chrome instance can read chrome's stdout. It's no more or less secure than the same concern with a regular Chrome.