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Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI
- AbuAssar 5mo ago> No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No fighting the compiler for 20 minutes over a string. I don’t like this attitude, both zig and rust have their strengths.
- nurettin 5mo agoRust has bad ergonomics. You will see that "attitude" as long as coding exists, or lifetimes are fixed in a way to allow you to omit them in contexts which are not concurrent or are embarrassingly parallelizable.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoI would take Zig over Rust any time. It simply fits the way I think much much better. And since 0.16/0.17 Zig introduced a very nice async/concurrency system that doesn't require function coloring. While async in Rust still feels strange and not well integrated.
- pmarreck 5mo ago> "I don't like this attitude" Cool, let me know when you have a rational counterargument then, some of us have gotten fed up with Rust (especially at scale) and are very much enjoying Zig (which has no magic, which turns out to be a huge advantage at scale)
- adastra22 5mo agoOk have fun. The rest of us are having no problems.
- pmarreck 5mo agoThat must explain the projects moving away from Rust then
- ramon156 5mo ago"No borrow checker" id not a reason to switch to Zig, unless you have a reason that borrow checker is limiting you from developing, hence the "I don't like this attitude". Just give the reason, not the "solution" Not to mention we're nitpicking over something that an LLM wrote.
- InsideOutSanta 5mo agoThere doesn't really need to be a counterargument. If you like Zig, that's great. Zig is great, you are great. You go on using it.
- mpalmer 5mo agoYou should really make sure to take your own advice when you're being this discourteous.
- pmarreck 5mo agoFair enough
- trueno 5mo agoit's not attitude that sentence (not x, not y ...) is pure uncut llm slop
- vijaybritto 5mo agoIm not sure if people are getting the biggest problem in electron desktop apps. Its RAM usage not the disk!! Why are they all making the same thing in different ways?! I have never worked on an electron app where the executable size was an impediment to the business. Its always the RAM/CPU usage. If we are going to work on the same webviews like electron and others, how will this make any difference?
- Bolwin 5mo agoCause they all share one webview. Electron apps each run their own version of chromium
- cosmotic 5mo agoUsing the system webview theoretically saves memory. Though it's still not great.
- mpweiher 5mo agoEasy: the problem with memory is not the WebView nor is it displaying HTML using that WebView. The problem is the layers of layers of JavaScript (frameworks) running in that WebView when using Electron or the like. I am working on something similar, HTMXNative as part of a bigger idea called interscri.pt that can use either WebView or native for rendering and the difference in memory consumption is somewhere between minimal (or even undetectable) and modest. From a baseline that's also modest by current (native) standards.
- vijaybritto 5mo agoI am cursed that I always have to work on legacy products that were built many years ago and didnt consider these things. I hope we eventually get a good/simple language/framework that can compile to native code. Even react native for mac/windows is good enough now.
- aiscoming 5mo agoI love the redefinition of "native desktop app" - a web app which uses the system web-view instead of bundling Chrome.
- feverzsj 5mo agoConsidering Microsoft already doing this in win11, it's fine.
- lionkor 5mo agoIf Microsoft does it now, and didn't used to do it, it's probably terrible.
- HappySweeney 5mo agoThey are redeveloping much of that electron-based code back to Win32 as part of their quality improvement initiative.
- h4ch1 5mo ago> Use the system WebView for lightweight apps, or bundle Chromium via CEF so basically a vibe coded Tauri in zig? I don't like calling webview dependent applications "native desktop apps". Native desktop apps means using the OS primitives and directives to draw the UI imo; WinForms, SwiftUI, and their ilk.
- thayne 5mo agoMaybe it's called zero native because that is how native it is.
- popcorncowboy 5mo ago"Not native" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily (dot com is available for a few grand). Concept is solid, an ingenious name even.
- rob74 5mo agoThat was my interpretation too (no idea if it's correct though)...
- kroaton 5mo agoIf Tauri ever gets proper webgpu support, that'll be the Electron killer.
- cyanydeez 5mo agonothings going to kill electron. The value of packaging the chrome browser is you don't need to suddenly track down 4+ different webview rendering bugs, capabilities, etc.
- delta_p_delta_x 5mo agoTiny nitpick: Windows Forms wraps the Windows API; the function call is `CreateWindowEx`[1]. [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/27e7cb2e5043780dd75e3837ac4643b670a990dc/src/System.Windows.Forms/System/Windows/Forms/NativeWindow.cs#L439 https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/27e7cb2e5043780dd75e...
- norskeld 5mo agoGiven this is from Vercel and most likely vibe coded (hopefully not), I wonder how many zero-day vulnerabilities will be there... :^)
- boxed 5mo agoNo screenshot examples even? :/
- DeathArrow 5mo agoStill, using system's native GUI should be more performant and use less memory. I would rather see existing Zig GUI libraries using system's GUI primitives improving. With LLM GUI stuff should be simple enough and we don't need to rely on people web expertise to build desktop apps.
- thayne 5mo agoUnfortunately, all the native "system" GUI frameworks are all terrible in their own unique ways. Unless you mean drawing the gui directly to a graphics surface, which often results in even poor accessibility and system integration unless the developer cares a lot about that and puts a lot of effort into it.
- kombine 5mo agoQt is used to develop arguably the best desktop environment on the market - KDE Plasma - as well as a miriad of serious software artifacts. It's not exactly native to MacOS and Windows, but advantages overweight the downsides.
- jerleth 5mo agoSounds very similar to webui (zig version: https://github.com/webui-dev/zig-webui https://github.com/webui-dev/zig-webui) What is the difference?
- iamcalledrob 5mo agoUsing the "system WebView" is not a positive on Linux. For some reason that always means WebKitGTK, which is crummy. Someone, anyone, please get CEF working with GTK4.
- iamsaitam 5mo agozero examples
- Oxodao 5mo agoThis is not native.
- jsomedon 5mo agoThat is not native at all.
- easeout 5mo agoThen why make an app instead of a website?
- lifty 5mo agoSlightly off topic, but what is the best way to build a cross platform GUI app these days, but something with good graphics, typography, etc. I mean a beautiful app. I would prefer to have a shared core in Go, and then something around it to give me the GUI. I know on MacOS it is straightforward to build something beautifully looking with their native Swift toolkit, but not sure on Linux and Windows. Is it better to just use a web view, or perhaps Flutter?
- kitd 5mo agoI've not used it myself, but I've heard good things about Wails. https://wails.io/ https://wails.io/
- lifty 5mo agoI have my eyes on that, looking forward to V3, maybe they manage to ship mobile support as well. That would be fantastic. For anyone that doesn't know, it's still a browser based stack.
- aiscoming 5mo agoif typography is critical for you, nothing has better support for it than the web platform
- d12bb 5mo agoThe web platform, which just recently gained tolerable text wrap? https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/ https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wr...
- hypendev 5mo agoI'm actually working on that - it's called Hypen - (hypen.space). You can build your core in Go or any other supported language, and write the UI in the Hypen DSL. While desktop is still in the works and should be out in the next week or two, currently the alpha supports Native iOS, Android, Web and Web Canvas, and just like mobile, the Desktop will be _real_ native.
- lionkor 5mo ago> No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No fighting the compiler for 20 minutes over a string. It's embarrassing. If the borrow checker and lifetimes are difficult for the author, I would suggest sticking with non-systems-languages. In systems languages you have to either do the work the borrow-checker does in your head, or you let Rust do it. If you are fighting the Rust compiler for 20 minutes over a string (or whatever actually happened that warrants this hyperbole), you are simply not writing good systems-level code. This is an advanced version of the kind of person who deliberately compiles without warnings in C because they make it harder to find the error messages. It's complete amateur hour and it's embarrassing. The real fix here is to learn how to do it properly. I VERY RARELY run into Rust compilation issues where I think "this is stupid". Nearly all of the time, the compiler is telling me that I forgot to think of something that I should have been thinking about, or that I've not been explicit enough. I've written C++ for way too long to know that this is hyper valuable. I've also written enough Zig to know that Zig is not for people who are bad at systems level programming. It'll blow up in your face, just like C.
- vrighter 5mo ago"native desktop app with web ui" Do you really see nothing wrong with this sentence?
- mpalmer 5mo agoTauri, but without the memory safety, funding, governance model, or human maintainers.
- JoeDohn 5mo ago"native", checks inside "web engines".
- p5v 5mo agoThis looks like Tauri. I don’t know. I still prefer simply shipping Go binaries around that fire up a local web server and open the web page on start. I’m old enough to care about these fancy languages, frameworks, native APIs and such. A dumb language like Go, in combination with HTMX and some JavaScript/CSS is all I need.