Just a Brief note about Tauri VS Electron. I've always been a opponent of Electron Apps. Even now, my Slack regularly pauses for seconds I suppose because the Garbage Collector has to do its thing.

Lately, however, I've worked on a Mastodon Client written in Dioxus (https://terhech.de/ebou/). Dioxus runs native Rust code and sends Dom Updates to a Tauri Webview. The difference in Ram and Performance is staggering. Much more lightweight because it uses the System Webview, and much faster because it's not Javascript. I've come to the conclusion that Electron itself is probably fast enough, but its the Javascript that causes it to crawl. (Obviously, my tiny app doesn't compare to Slack, but I've also done some simple-enough Electron Experiments).

And it makes sense: WebKit has seen tremendous amounts of investments to make it as fast as possible. CSS can do GPU based transforms, everything is heavily optimised. I'd venture that WebView rendering is just as fast as native (in the general case). What makes Electron slow is Javascript.

I decided to use Tauri for the first time for a university project and it was absolutely painless to design a small and useful GUI application to programatically generate schematics for photolithography masks.

- Single lightweight binary install and executable (~6 MB), clean uninstall

- Automatic updates (digitally signed, uploaded to a small VM)

- Integrates nicely with SvelteKit and TailwindCSS

- The Rust backend was able to integrate with GTSDK over FFI. The cmake crate made C++ compilation and linking automatic as part of cargo build, provided that a C++ toolchain is available (no problems even on Windows).

- No scary toolchain setup with a load of licenses to review and accept (looking at you, Flutter. I'm a student, not a lawyer. Although perhaps this will also be a thing with Tauri + Android?)

For a small project, I can't recommend it enough. I wouldn't know where to start with a C# or Qt GUI application, especially if I wanted to make it cross-platform.

It'll be interesting to see if it gains any traction in the mobile space. Flutter is great and may be better optimised for certain rendering techniques, such as infinite lists, but sticking with web technologies is a very compelling advantage.

If you’re going to convince mobile developers to use Tauri, at least invest some time in showcasing a good enough example. How do the apps do navigation? How do they store data for offline usage? How about networking? How can I access camera or hardware features?

Tauri might be the bees knees and cross platform toolkits are cool but I’m not seeing anything worthwhile in this blogpost.

Been using Dart & Flutter. Kinda leaning towards using plain old HTML & CSS inside a webview instead of learning how to work with mobile-specific widgets. Neither won't beat pure-native but at least I'd be able to make a half-decent app fast with HTML & CSS. Tauri looks enticing from that perspective but idk how polished it is vs Flutter.

Oh I'm already using Rust in backend so that wouldn't be a big deal. Wonder how well you're able to do GPU / graphics stuff inside webview though? Is WebGPU supported?

Sounds like a webview loading a Next.js application wrapped in a Rust binary targeting iOS?

For me, it always felt much more difficult to match the native ui behaviours in a web application that it defeats the time won. Especially, when you want to support both Android and iOS.

Is there a library/framework/toolkit/whatever to make native GUI Android apps in rust? That's what I'm missing. I'm not interested in creating a web app as an Android app. Tauri looks interesting but it's not for me. And that's fine, because there's a whole lot of people who would use it, I'm sure.

> Note: This is based on the 2.0 Alpha version and the early version of the documentation. An updated version of the create-tauri-app utility is in development to make a number of the following steps easier.

CTA v3 was released a few hours ago: https://tauri.app/blog/2023/03/01/create-tauri-app-version-3...

I've said this a number of times but I'll repeat here. I'm new to web development and was completely overwhelmed by the choice of which framework I should learn. I wanted to develop a simple app that needed to run on mobile and desktop, maybe later as a webapp. I learned html/CSS and vanilla JavaScript in the end, but for my app dart/flutter. I gave up on the various frameworks, I still cant decide if one or the other is the one I should be learning, the risk of wasting my time on a soon to be dead framework isn't one I'm willing to take.

All that said, for the novice, why would I use this over dart/flutter, or even one of the huge amount of other JavaScript frameworks?

What is Tauri's advantages over Cordova?

Cordova failed the competition against React Native and Flutter.

Is the native SDK story with this that you'd be on the hunt for Rust libraries that invoke native mobile functionality? Not sure if there are any well-maintained bindings to those SDKs around, but could be wrong. There are plenty for desktop, but I haven't seen any high quality mobile OS bindings.

Otherwise I imagine you could use capacitor from JS? But I see no pitch for how this should be done so far.

Eh, it's still a web view at the end of the day, I'd rather use native, RN or Flutter, and with Flutter I can also use Rust via flutter_rust_bridge. That is in fact what I'm already doing currently with one of my apps.

the page doesn't provide a really good understanding of what the framework is : is it using native ui components ? which part is for the server, which is for the client, and what does the framework provides in terms of bindings between the two ? etc..

The fact that many independent cross-platform app frameworks build something around webview suggests there is a baby crying to be born here, but what exactly it will look like is not clear.

I'd be interested to know how the non-GUI part of the app would work. Things that are native to Android, like sending notifications, toast, or setting off alarm etc.?

What is the platform api story (kotlin/Swift ffi) for tauri mobile?

Flutter has way better support