Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

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This is basically the same thing as Tauri but once again, the difference is the language used. I don't know what the selling point is other than it is using Go FFI to talk to the Desktop APIs.

The reason why Electron exists is that it is able to directly turn existing web apps or anything using the Chrome APIs into desktop apps and being compatible with the wider Javascript ecosystem as well with little effort other than adapting to the desktop. I don't think that it is possible with this or Tauri unless you want to rewrite the whole thing and not depend on Chromium APIs.

A great alternative would be compatible with these Chromium APIs and allow an easy migration off of Electron but that is not going to happen anytime soon.

Either way, I'd rather see Flutter Desktop as a suitable competitor and a possible alternative to Electron desktop apps rather than these webview-based alternatives.

Many web apps do not use node.js on the backend, so I don't really think that's the point of electron. It's more that it's a way to develop a cross platform application without having to deal too much with native differences. Being able to leverage web tech for the UI also means you can reuse your companies existing expertise.

In that sense, these alternatives all meet the requirement, as on the UI side they all use standard web technology. The difference is 1) they don't package the entire chrome runtime which saves a lot of memory and 2) they use different backend languages, some of which may match a given companies expertise better. E.g. if you already have a lot of Go or Rust developers, these alternatives might allow you to reuse existing backend code in these languages.

Finally, the experience of developing with the alternatives is often superior to electron. Every time I've setup electron for a new project I've spent days messing with complex tooling. In contrast, at least with wails, I've spent close to zero time on tooling. Ironically, the time I have spent on tooling has been on the javascript side.

Here you are: https://flet.dev - Electron alternative with Flutter-powered UI. We decided to focus on Python first to polish the idea, but Go and C# support are coming!

This is fantastic, been meaning to learn Flutter for a long time (and probably still should), but having it in a language I already know and use is a whole other level

Nice! How does the packaging works ? Is it through pyinstaller ?

PyInstaller should work. Will look into that and write a guide.

<3

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