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Electrobun v1: Build fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop apps with TypeScript
I'm building a commercial macOS app with Electrobun [1]. I have previously written the same app with Tauri. I'll say that, while I love Tauri, using Electrobun has been an absolute breeze. I got the same app done in roughly 70% of the time [2]. It's a very productive stack. In no small part due to Electrobun, but also the fact that Bun has tons of DX niceties and a builtin bundler.
Electrobun lets you open/manipulate/close webview windows and communicate with them using typed rpc. It also handles building, code signing, and notarization.
And because I'm using Bun, running an HMR + React + Tailwind server is just one command (`bun ./index.html`) or like 5 lines of code. Pass --console and the webview's console.log()s get streamed to your Terminal too.
There's tons of other things Electrobun does that I haven't even mentioned, because I haven't interacted much with them yet. E.g. I know that it lets you show platform-native notifications, prompts/popups, etc.
There also is a very impressive updating mechanism that relies on a bsdiff implementation written in Zig. You just ship the deltas, so updates to very large apps are just a few KBs most of the time.
It's genuinely a very productive stack and impressive piece of tech.
[1] Not affiliated - I just like the project.
[2]: The API and implementation was clear, so I'll cautiously say this is not a case of "rewrites are always faster". In fact, the Tauri version was a rewrite too :)
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- maddada 8mo agoLooks very promising, will be building my next project with it. Full TS stack is where I'm most productive. I'm glad we now have a more performant and lean alternative to Electron while not needing to deal with Rust and long compilation steps.
- zdragnar 8mo agoNeat! Here's the project main page for those interested in more than the release announcement: https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/ https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/ It certainly looks clean enough, and I'm more familiar with zig than rust, so I might give it a shot.
- queenkjuul 8mo agoI'm going to production with a new Electron app at my job this week, i wish this had existed a year ago lol. Electron Builder does a pretty good job making the updates and signatures not TOO painful but it hasn't been painless by any stretch. Looks cool, I'll try this for my next personal desktop project and see how it goes
- hu3 8mo agoI see a lot of game devs in discord experimenting with Electrobun to release desktop games. I think it's going to eat a piece of the Electron pie for Steam indie games. Most stay with bun after seeing how fast and seamless it is to run typescript games with instant auto reload: bun --watch game.ts
- GCUMstlyHarmls 8mo agoAre many games built with Electron ...? I know there are a few HTML5 games, crosscode was the first one I recall seeing that really pushed it. Aren't most small games Unity or Godot?
- hopfog 8mo agoCrossCode is a marvel in that they had to build their own runtime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155807 I think the most famous Electron game is Vampire Suvivors, but it has since been ported to Unity.
- egeozcan 8mo agoI do a lot of web development, and even if we set the great tooling aside for a moment, Bun is still a major improvement (a real leap, I’d say) when it comes to performance.
- hopfog 8mo agoWhat Discord server are you referring to? Would love to join.
- merlindru 8mo agoalso wondering about this. it sure isn't in electrobuns own discord server. i'm in that one and its mostly Q&A (with Yoav doing most of the answering and a couple people like me doing most of the questioning, ha) this is the first i'm hearing about games being built with electron / web tech too, let alone electrobun. i thought most game devs would just go for unity or godot
- skybrian 8mo agoI'm wondering about security for this sort of thing. I guess it's like node.js in the sense that while you could load JavaScript code downloaded from the Internet at runtime, you probably shouldn't? Any additional gotchas due to the web view?
- Ikryanov 8mo agoThe business logic of your app is running in the Main process using Bun runtime. The website you load or the app's frontend is running in a separate sandboxed Renderer process. When I run Electrobun app on macOS, I see that it launches the following processes with the following RAM usage: - views://mainview (33.7MB) <- your frontend is running here - react-tailwind-vite-dev Networking (5.4MB) - react-tail wind-vite-dev Graphics and Media (16.7MB) - react-tailwind-vite-dev (60.7MB)
- merlindru 8mo agono real gotchas. JS is slightly dangerous because of JS, yes. You should never fetch things at runtime to execute if possible - instead, you install absolutely everything you need with npm or bun, and it gets inlined at build time electrobun ships with an RPC (i think it also does some encryption?) so as long as you use that to communicate between your webview and bun "host process" you should be safe.
- nine_k 8mo ago/* Looked at the product for which Electrobun was built, co(lab). «Focus on building instead of managing tools. Keep your code, browser, terminal, notes, and git workflow in one unified interface.» Well, a great idea! This is what Emacs mostly gives me. */
- synergy20 8mo agosize? performance? bun last time I checked alone is 130MB
- perpil 8mo agoThis page says bundle size is 14MB: https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/ https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/
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- sumolessons 8mo agoThis looks promising. And it's exciting to think it could also target mobile [1]. [1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/21237 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/21237
- lukevp 8mo agoOne of the main problems I see with tauri is that system web views just aren’t a great solution for a ui framework. Partly because Linux doesn’t have an official webview implementation, partly because the web views across OS versions have differences (eg. Tauri on Linux had a benchmark saying the boot time was 20+ seconds because of the webview, and win 7 and I think even early versions of win 10 do not use the edge webview). This is a lot of tradeoffs for saving 100 megs. I understand that we should be good stewards of our customers’ hardware and not waste things unnecessarily, but also have to balance that with shipping something and not worrying about all the edge cases. Most people in developed countries have Internet connections of 100+ mbps, which means the app will still download in <10 seconds. Does electrobun support using an embedded chromium for the renderer? I went to the project readme and it was really unclear if that’s a currently-supported option and if so, how to use it.
- onimishra 8mo ago“System's native webview as renderer, CEF Optional” Taken from the product site (not this blog post) that was linked by another user. So you get to choose it would seem.
- jauntywundrkind 8mo agoThere is a ton of work going into a Tauri based on CEF. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/tree/feat/cef https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/tree/feat/cef My hope is this still acts like a library that multiple Tauri instances share. That would still have the upside of Tauri's shared library architecture (boo statically compiled programs, what a waste of precious ram!) while still letting us have a viable runtime. First app load might not be lightning fast but second app load is hopefully faster!! The OS webviews range from mediocre to absolute garbage; this to me would be a great improvement, that makes me happy!
- Ikryanov 8mo agoA Tauri app built on CEF (Chromium) is very similar to Electron (which also uses Chromium). The key difference is that Tauri uses Rust for the application’s business logic, whereas Electron uses JavaScript. In this case I don't know why I should use Tauri instead of Electron.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoIf someone from Electrobun is reading this. Can Electrobun compile to android as well. I want to create a simple application which can take some index.html and pass an adblocker and create an app out of it since I think this idea is pretty cool. I ended up having to use Ionic to create a html <-> Android app thing within github actions but Ionic doesn't support ad blocking abilities.
- merlindru 8mo agothey don't support mobile targets at the moment but i'm pretty sure i saw the creator saying it's a "sometime in the future" thing
- rubymamis 8mo agoI guess since Electron apps are 500MB+, 14MB is considered "tiny".
- Ikryanov 8mo agoA regular Electron app for macOS (DMG) is ~80MB. Electrobun's DMG is ~16MB.
- throwaway290 8mo agoAnd with Election that includes entire Chromium so no need to be fighting system webviews.
- pidgeon_lover 8mo agoOnce installed, I've found Electron installs tend to balloon from 80-200mb (installer) to 1.5GB or more (Electron + dedicated browser cache)
- phplovesong 8mo agoAre there any numbers on comparison to electron?
- merlindru 8mo agoi'm not sure how you could have any meaningful comparison here except for comparing bun to node. everything is pretty modular so you can swap things out. i would compare webview to chromium bundle size, but that has tradeoffs too, and electrobun can use chromium (CEF) too. so that's also moot. what kind of numbers are you looking for?
- Alifatisk 8mo agoTitle should maybe specify that this is a blogpost from the author reflecting over the project. There’s better link to showcase the actual project https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs
- KingOfCoders 8mo agoMoved from the molasses of VSCode to Rust-based Zed, no comparison. The second is snappy, responsive, uses much less memory (I can have 5 Zed open at the same time, no problems), not looking back.
- codethief 8mo ago@OP I know it's "just" a webview at the end of the day but I still think the Electrobun website could use a screenshot or two. (Or maybe e.g. a short video of an app comparing the startup times of Electrobun, Tauri, Electron etc.)
- codethief 8mo ago> short video of an app comparing the startup times of Electrobun, Tauri, Electron etc. Looks like I hit the submit button a bit too fast. I meant to say: "a short video comparing the startup times of apps using Electrobun, Tauri, Electron etc." (I can't edit my comment anymore unfortunately.)
- InfiniteLoopGuy 8mo agoCan modern LLMs effectively be used on Electrobun codebases?
- merlindru 8mo agoyes. the actual APIs are very simple. i'm using claude code a lot
- chrisco255 8mo agoHow big does a hello world binary compile to with this?
- merlindru 8mo agoafaik its around 14MB but the large majority of that is the Bun runtime itself. at some point it will likely be possible to pick and choose parts of the runtime to include in the binary. thus the bundle size could get a lot smaller in the future that said electrobun's author has published a bsdiff implementation in zig, and thats used for electrobun's updater. that means you download deltas, not the entire application bundle, every time you push an update to your users. and then it gets patched in-place. this makes updates tiny, to the tune of a couple kB
- mrighele 8mo agoJust tried their hello world * npx electrobun init * [choose hello-world] * bun install * bun run build This generates in linux a folder that takes about 60M [1] (mostly the "bun" executable) [1] du says 60M, ls says 100M, maybe it is a sparse file ?
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- xrd 8mo agoThe article mentioned notarizing and stapling as problems with prior frameworks. What's the story here? If you don't use xcode as your ide (and I don't see that this project management is happening inside xcode), Apple makes that stuff really hard. And windows is easier but still hard to automate in CI. If this framework offers better solutions I'm all ears.
- merlindru 8mo agomost use cases are supported out of the box. you just have to set a few env vars and then build with "notarize: true" in your config... and it pretty much just works i've signed and notarized things with electrobun and it's perfectly fine. it also gives you escape hatches in case you're doing something more complicated EDIT: in case i can help you with anything there, feel free to DM me! or join the electrobun discord. i'm very active there. (im not affiliated with EB. just know the struggle of apples notarization system)
- xrd 8mo agoThanks, that's great! Very generous.
- yoav 8mo agoHey HN, Electrobun creator here. Thanks for posting this. We just hit v1 - stable which means I've locked down the architecture. If you run into any bugs or need specific apis that you miss from Electron or Tauri please open Github issues and I'll prioritize them. I shipped 50,000 lines of code changes stabilizing and polishing electrobun for v1 over the last month. Here's a video demo of Colab (also open source) (a hybrid web browser + code editor + PTY terminal) that is built with Electrobun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWTCqGmE86w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWTCqGmE86w Electrobun uses the system webview by default, but a lot of the hello worlds feature the bundleCEF option. Because Electrobun is architected to be webview agnostic when servo and ladybird are ready they should be drop-in alternatives. Electrobun apps also auto generate a zstd self-extraction wrapper and patch files with every release, so your initial download will be much smaller than if you'd used zip and your updates will be as small as 14KB so you can ship as often as you like without you or your users paying the bandwidth tax.
- merlindru 8mo agothank you for building electrobun!!
- sureglymop 8mo agoAre the types up to date with the docs? For example, when using BrowserWindow I get typescript errors if trying to pass an object with the key "partition".
- jit-it 8mo agowas looking for something just like this. Really helpful
- hwisnu_bearblog 8mo agoimpressive work! this might nudge me into building desktop applications.
- Jgoauh 8mo agocan you build a single .exe standalone app or standalone installer ? i only see folders or .exes relying on buind in the same folder is the archive
- moogly 8mo agoOther distros than Ubuntu are out of scope[1], so not usable for me, sadly. [1]: https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun/issues/4#issuecomment-3850916198 https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun/issues/4#issuecom...
- ugouwakwe 8mo agoAwesome tooling indeed. I made the switch from my native Swift/SwiftUI app to electrobun. Building the UI in React + Tailwind, while having the RPC bridge to my native core is the game changer for me