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Comment by parker-codes | Hacker News Reader

Regarding point #4, I think the clear winner is Tauri. I'll clarify --

While writing in Node is great if you don't know Rust, your users are being shipped an entire Node runtime, which has size, memory, and security issues. So in this case Electron has a "better" DX completely at the cost of the user.

Tauri has JS/TS APIs, but if you need to do extensive backend work then it requires some learning at the benefit of your users. After learning Rust myself, I'd say it's the benefit of the developers too, but that's just my opinion. :)

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You're implying that application written in Rust would not have no size, memory and security issues. That is of course not true.

Do you think it's unreasonable to assume that an app written in Rust will be smaller, use less memory and be safer than a similar app written in JavaScript?

I think it’s safe to assume that of anything written in something which doesn’t bundle an entire browser.

Though I do think it’s unrealistic that the legions of JavaScript devs are going to learn rust to make simple desktop apps because it doesn’t really have a reputation of being an easy language to learn.

The UI part of the app with its HTML/CSS/Javascript is normally the most the memory hungry part - there won't be a huge difference there between tauri and electron.

It depends on how big your app is. The problem with Electron is that it bundles its own installation of Chromium, so if you have 5 Electron apps, you have 5 instances of Chromium taking up memory. With something like Tauri, the system web view is used, which is likely already loaded into memory, so the marginal memory usage of each additional application is very small.

A big enough application will dwarf Chromium's memory usage with its own, but for smaller apps, the cost of running your own Chromium instance will dominate your app's memory overhead.

> Do you think it's unreasonable to assume that an app written BY ME in Rust will be smaller, use less memory and be safer than a similar app written in JavaScript?

No, it won't be. You gotta weigh years if not decades of Node/JS experience vs 0 years of Rust experience of the average dev. Development time will be far shorter too.

As far as size goes:

a) Compiled JS apps generally have to include a whole Javascript engine, which makes them significantly larger b) Rust is designed for shipping small static binaries, whereas Node is not; node.exe by itself is tens of megabytes, and you can only make it smaller by compiling it yourself from source. Deno has compiling static binaries as an explicit feature so it may fare better in the long run, but it's still limited by a)

As an example: I just tested on MacOS and a hello world program compiled with `rustc` is 378KB, whereas one built with `deno compile` is 74MB.

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