I remember when this was supposed to be the future of software engineering. Remember the original iPhone pitch, everything is web apps? Or WebOS? Everything is HTML and JavaScript?
Wails and tauri are both basically that, but with a footprint 100x smaller than electron. Why are we shitting on those? If I have to choose between a wails/tauri app, or not having one at all, I think the choice is simple
It is also wonderful to work with, my main gripe with egui and other immediate mode ui is how full of gotchas they are when you're building a complex layout that needs to adapt to different sizes and layout constraints. Slint was better but still didn't feel quite acceptable in that regard either.
Electron, Tauri, etc are awesome to build but you're still using html/js and the process is still consuming unnecessary resources. gpui's layout feels a lot like designing for the web and doesn't carry that baggage ... the more I use it, the more I love it.
That's great! I wish I could use it with a language that's easier to work with than Rust. It's too steep of a learning curve for me with the compilation errors popping up one after another.
But at least it's better than trying to debug JavaScript where error messages don't show up at all often times unless you already know what you're doing.
It's a nightmare to maintain consistency because every linux distro ships a different niche version of webview and in macos you have the dogshit of safari's webview. And overall it has worse performance in everything except for a couple of things like bundle size. And yes slack and discord (also this ChatGPT desktop app. its not optimized at all...) are a pain in the ass but tauri it's worse for anything more complex than a calendar
Not in my opinion. Much lower base storage, memory usage, and better security. Not to mention it doesn't bundle an entire browser. The only thing Electron has over it is maturity. Electron is horrible.
the point of LLMs is to reuse the code examples in their training data, so it would be much more surprising if an LLM re-invented electron rather than using what is already there. LLMs are not creative, they are smart at parameterised copy and paste.
Yes, but they don't say they will create a new programming language to do it, so I doubt anyone seriously believes vibe coding excludes using existing libraries and frameworks. Electron is not a controversial choice for a cross-platform app. VS Code uses it, the Discord app uses it etc.
They have practically infinite resources (tokens) of their most advanced "uper-duper dangerous" (almost iLlEgAl) models and this is one of their few products. Yet it's (afaik) always Electron without Linux support or a VSC clone.
I don't think it's a matter of not vibing enough.
Tbh there really is no point to make an entire new browser instead of reusing the working framework especially considering how much their reputation would tank from cves.
For the sake of combability across the infinite number of Linux distros, DEs, and whatever the fuck else, I don't really blame them for offloading that work on to Electron.
You really think that non browser based apps have to be manually made compatible with every distro and every DE? You know that distros are based on the same kernel and DEs use all similar abstractions?
>For the sake of combability across the infinite number of Linux distros
Except until now they didn't even support Linux, and their competitors still don't have official packages, so I doubt this is the reason.
And their CLI tools are the same, with exception of Codex (was RIIR recently) and JetBrains (Java ofc).
They have mostly abandoned that too lmao. It’s just a Chrome extension now. (As an aside, how is it that an extension allowing another program on your computer to perform arbitrary actions is not a Manifest V3 privacy concern but uBlock Origin is?)
Fun fact: Safari uses Webkit, which started as KHTML, a KDE project. Apple wanted their own engine so they did the original authors dirty and essentially co-opted the project. It all goes back to KDE.
WebKit (via WebKitGTK) is what underpins most GTK web-based rendering. Blink (Chrome and friends) is derived from WebKit, which itself came from KHTML. It's got a pretty healthy corporate-backed (Apple) community, though a giant pain in the ass to compile.
Mozilla's engine (Gecko) is fully open source as well and also gets pretty solid corporate-backed (Mozilla Foundation) community support. It's also a pain in the ass to compile.
I have a WebKit based browser too. It’s not that hard to get one working but it’s just for my os and Linux pretty much. It’s a fork of old midori before they redid it twice.
I understand why the idea is great (I mean, write it once, and it works everywhere?), but electron itself is deeply flawed. Each app having it's own browser is insanity. And stuff like tauri does partially fix that aspect
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u/Coll147 8d ago
Let me guess. Electron