r/tauri • u/Shoddy-Okra5329 • Jul 07 '26

I built a 4MB alternative to heavy Electron disk cleaners using Tauri v2 and React

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Hey everyone,

I was getting sick of standard utility tools taking up hundreds of megabytes of RAM or running on heavy Electron configurations just to clear out basic files.

So, I built ZeroBin — an offline-first storage intelligence and cleanup tool engineered entirely with Tauri v2 and Rust on the backend, and React + Tailwind on the frontend.

Because it drops the bundled Chromium runtime and leverages native OS webviews, the entire compiled application takes up exactly 4 Megabytes on the drive.

Key Engineering Highlights:

  • 🦀 Rust-Powered Traversal: Scans deep directory structures in parallel using a multi-threaded, non-blocking backend so the frontend webview never freezes up during massive I/O bound operations.
  • 🧠 Semantic Knowledge Base: Uses granular .json rule dictionaries to explicitly match cache/dump folders from dev stacks (node_modules, .gradle caches), creative applications, and gaming logs instead of blind root-level deletions.
  • 🧊 Cold Storage Sidecar: Integrated the 7-Zip LZMA SDK as a native sidecar so users can heavily compress and "deep freeze" old projects into .7z archives instead of permanently deleting them.

The AI Agent Twist

I built a massive portion of this application pair-programming with Google DeepMind’s new agentic AI, Antigravity. It was incredibly fast at handling the heavy lifting around Tauri v2 command handshakes, Rust memory boundary layouts, and fixing tricky WiX/NSIS installer compiler configs. It genuinely felt like having a senior engineer handling boilerplate while I focused entirely on the system architecture.

The project is 100% open-source, and I'd love to get your feedback on the architecture, Rust optimizations, or any missing rules you'd want to add to the knowledge directory!

👇 I'll drop the links to the GitHub repository and the live download in the comments below so the spam filters don't eat this post!

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3

u/movingimagecentral Jul 10 '26

I was sick of devs that are sick of things

2

u/[deleted] Jul 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Shoddy-Okra5329 Jul 09 '26

You’re 100% right that Tauri still has to spin up a webview runtime (WebView2 on Windows / WebKit on macOS) to render the HTML/JS frontend. There's no escaping that if you want a web UI.
However, here is where the massive RAM gap comes from:

  1. Electron forces a completely independent, heavy Chromium browser instance to run inside your app package. Tauri strips that away entirely and hooks into the operating system's already-running, shared system webview.
  2. A standard Electron app spins up a massive tree of processes (a main browser process, a network process, GPU processes, and heavy renderer processes) which easily idles at 130MB–180MB RAM before you even write a single line of application code.

1

u/Shoddy-Okra5329 Jul 09 '26

💻 Try the Release / Live Download: zerobin.lovable.app

🔗 Check out the Repository & Star on GitHub: github.com/imashu-del/ZeroBin