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Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

I am at the opposite extreme. We should ditch electron and use browsers good enough integrated they can run all the apps with native feel and reusing the same engine (not a lacklustre OS webview but a complete one) This solves the memory overhead, solves unpatched or misconfigured chromium in each electron app as well as portability and reusing web dev skills. Also this would allow permissions and security to be managed by a layer that can focus on that and I don't have to worry about what a native app can do. (OS permissions and sandboxing are just not made for vibecoded infinite software and likely never will catch up) All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more. I will never trust discord or Spotify to run something natively on my machine and so should no one else.

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You can optimize all you want, but if your foundation is a pack of cards, you're not going very far. JavaScript is not a solid foundation to build anything on. It's a language that should have been extinct long ago along with internet explorer. But, people kept trying to save it - adding abstraction on top of abstraction, even languages on top of it (coffeescript, typescript) just to get it to work at the baseline of a decent language. It's the only language that is forced upon us. If browsers gave us options to use other languages, it would and should've been long been dead.

> All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more.

A well built web app will never be more performance than a well built native app. It's just inherent due to the JavaScript abstraction.

Never? We already had this discussion about JVM, and we know for a fact that it's possible for JIT to achieve better performance with that damned bytecode compared to natively compiled equivalent.

It would be extraordinary to see a real world rust program use more memory than its JVM equivalent.

Let's not move the goalposts, the word in question is "performant".

Though even with memory it's not as clear as you assume in the context (which is about browser-based apps). Singular C/Zig/Rust program will surely be more economical than a singular in-browser app due to browser itself having a huge footprint. But what if said user has that browser open all the time anyway as probably most users do? What if there are more than one GUI-rich app, and with browser they share most of the overhead? PLs which allow low-level optimizations offer great opportunities, no arguing. But never say "never" until you know what exact problem yiu have to deal with.

> Let's not move the goalposts, the word in question is "performant".

Even though the word performance was used by a parent comment, I think they used it as an umbrella term. The article and most of the talk around rust discord is primarily about the memory. And JVM is probably the worst runtime you could pick if you care about memory usage.

You cannot separate performance from memory usage. Usually less memory usage for apps comes at the cost of performance and vice versa.

And more memory usage can slow down the whole system, because the system may need to swap and compress memory.

Yes never

The security boundary here is difficult, if you intend to integrate with native workflows.

Also difficult to manage fake websites duplicating the look and feel. Scamming people into giving access or passwords.

A native app which is installed once from a good source is more secure, i feel.

I agree with this. And even further, I think we wasted a decade or so, forcing web and native apart - especially on mobile. Partly due to Apple building a native moat when we could have put resources into building a more performant and powerful internet.

I just run discord in the browser.

The native one reads the titles of open windows on your desktop, and God knows what else.

(Well, I don't use discord at all anymore, but I very intentionally never used the desktop app.)

In a way yes, but things like keyboard shortcut, file pickers and similar are major convenience issues and not as easy if the only thing that runs on the metal is a server process, and the UI is limited to the browser. A webview UI like Tauri might solve that (I'm not familiar with it, so I can't say if it does).

I think that's also the main reason software like VS Code is electron based and not browser based.

I'm with you.

I created my own declarative react-like UI library that is small, efficient, and does things just the way I want. I have absolutely no desire to go back to the days where for every platform I want to develop for, I need to learn whole new UI paradigm, with all its quirks and gaps and inefficiencies.

Past a certain age, having to do this every year or two get old fast. And, it is not necessary for good performance. The only holding back good performance and capabilities from web apps are the platform vendors.

> well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists

A well built anything is better than most software. I would argue that a well built rust app will probably a higher quality piece of software than typescript slop produced by Microsoft.

Not sure who's still using electron...Rust + Tauri is pretty much standard these days.

I wish I could agree but Tauri performance is insanely bad on Linux.

I think it'll be fixed soon but it drives me nuts.

Flutter is under appreciated for desktop.

what metrics drive you nuts ?

Dioxus has many renderers and also cross-platform.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus#experimental-native-ren...

Blitz itself is a great experiment in debloating.

How's that different? You are still shipping a web browser and rendering through the inefficiency of the DOM event/rendering model. Sure it helps that the business logic is written in a native language, but modern, JIT-ed JS isn't a sloth either, and I don't think that's what people have gripes with and what causes abnormally large runtimes.

there's a lot of difference, please just look it up in any AI. Essentially, you do not ship a browser in Tauri.

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