upvote

points

by yboris7 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby m_w_7 hours ago|
next
[-]
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
reply
upvoteby wren69916 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Using Tauri on Linux gave me appreciation for why Electron just ships an entire browser. WebKitGTK is kinda rough around the edges.
reply
upvoteby egeozcan6 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I vibe-coded a paste manager using wails (https://github.com/egeozcan/mahpastes), and I'm currently on linux (bazzite) and I have 0 problems with the rendering.
reply
upvoteby wren69915 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
One of the things I hit is that there is no way to trigger an "open folder" dialog. It gets mapped to "open file" instead. The correct hooks exist in both WebKit and in GTK, but not wired up in WebKitGTK. I think the fix would be quite minor but I looked into what is involved in raising a patch and decided to leave it. There are a lot of minor paper cuts like this.

I did hit a couple of CSS or rendering quirks, but the rendering perf also seemed noticeably poor, and that's harder to live with.

reply
upvoteby jorl171 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Recently vibe coded this https://www.rominabox.app/ and also loved Tauri for the "builder" part of it! What a pleasure to work with.

Granted, it's very simple, but I felt it was a breeze.

reply
upvoteby kelvie6 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Isn't egui really cpu inefficient though? It repaints at 60fps if e.g. you move the mouse over it
reply
upvoteby m_w_6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
If it is, it hasn't been a problem so far. I have been focused heavily on memoization, to what extent that's possible when fully vibe coding.

Fwiw, what it's trying to replace (GitKraken) is slow, clunky, and resource hungry, so it's not hard to beat.

reply
upvoteby tdhz776 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
No mobile support either
reply
upvoteby catigula7 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
You're probably doing something the LLM has less fluency with.
reply
upvoteby m_w_6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Definitely would concede this, but I haven't had any issues so far. It's been able to make things look exactly as I've dictated them, even with relatively complex visualization of git branching. I get the sense that, with how capable Opus 5.5 is, "less capable" no longer means "not capable enough".
reply
upvoteby 0x4577 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
LLMs can for sure write GTK4 (or Relm4), Swift UI, whatever windows uses, Kotlin for Android.
reply
upvoteby catigula7 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
They can write brainfuck. I said less fluency.
reply
upvoteby 0x4576 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
What I meant: they can write it pretty well. Probably because share of good quality code of native apps is much higher bad quality, due to all js slop we had even before LLM slop.
reply
upvoteby james2doyle7 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
You can just skip Tauri entirely and get true native apps. No web wrapping required
reply
upvoteby sosodev7 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree.
reply
upvoteby tadfisher7 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like.
reply
upvoteby sosodev6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
So I’m supposed to maintain a native app for each platform and try to be sure they’re aligned in every way except visuals? Sounds like a recipe for bad UX if anybody uses more than one of them.
reply
upvoteby Kuyawa5 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Not you, your coding agent, for three platforms and at least ten languages

If you go Rust all the way all you need is the installer for each platform

reply
upvoteby rafaelmn2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Agents are pretty shit at making UX decisions unless you're heavily in the training distribution
reply
upvoteby bigstrat20036 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product.
reply
upvoteby Rohansi5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. Sure, they'll never be as efficient as native, but people put a lot of work into optimizing browsers and most websites are never optimized.

Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger.

reply
upvoteby skydhash4 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
> I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole.

A web browser is a huge platform. Audio, 2D and 3D graphics, file handling, network requests,... A lot of code while your application needs are tiny. That is wasteful and a security risk.

reply
upvoteby Rohansi4 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
That's really only argument against shipping a browser with your application. For ordinary websites (or WebViews) that's not really a concern because it is shared and automatically updated.
reply
upvoteby mort966 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.
reply
upvoteby mikestew6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
If you're writing five apps, you're doing it wrong. A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. Yes, I oversimplify, but folks have been doing exactly that for decades. More work? Yup, even with a common engine it's more work than firing up Electron. That's where "do we even give a shit about what we're shipping?" comes in. If there's no pride in the finished product, well, Electron isn't going to save your product, either.
reply
upvoteby dpkirchner6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
IME, the UI library idiosyncrasies are the pieces that take the longest to get right. Common business logic is super simple by comparison.
reply
upvoteby mort965 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
> A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top.

I keep seeing people claim this, yet most UI software I see really doesn't do anything that complicated. It's some basic database CRUD stuff and some basic algorithms, and then all the actual effort lies in making the UI feel good.

reply
upvoteby skydhash6 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
> Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.

Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.

That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.

reply
upvoteby mort965 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
For a whole lot of apps, almost all of the difficult stuff is in making the UI feel right.
reply
upvoteby skydhash5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Aesthetics, usability, and technical flavor are different axes and feel right is a subjective point. And based on anecdata, usability is what actual users want. Web wrapping is mostly an exclusive focus on aesthetics. With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.
reply
upvoteby Karrot_Kream3 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
> With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.

I've only seen this sentiment on nerd forums but never among my less technical friends, so I'm a bit reluctant to accept this wisdom honestly. That said, if you're just building something for a technical crowd you'll probably make them much happier if you make your implementation use native widgets and take up much less memory and redraw faster at the expense of a slightly jankier UX. Though, this is probably why IRC clients all feel janky lol.

For example a lot of my less technical friends/family really like the visual design of Spotify even though it conflicts with a lot of design language on MacOS, Windows, and Android.

reply
upvoteby agentdev0017 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Or my manager... or my stakeholders. Damn you powers that be!
reply
upvoteby masklinn6 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
> But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right?

… good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms.

reply
upvoteby tavavex6 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate.
reply
upvoteby exmadscientist6 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.
reply
upvoteby tavavex5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Yes, modern Windows design is a bit of a mess, caused by both the designer bug of redesigning everything (we have had at least 3 different Windows design languages prevalent over the last 10 years) and Windows having to support extremely old legacy software. The second was almost nonexistent when Windows 95 was designed, they could have a true clean slate, so the comparison isn't as fair. But still, even with the abundance of native UI frameworks, the point holds true that no new software uses any of them, no matter if it's Win32 or WinUI. They could implement them very easily, and some hobbyist software does so, and it looks very native and in-line with the rest of Windows 11, but they choose not to.

And yes, the 3.11 ODBC file selector is still in Windows 11. Praise be to legacy components.

reply
upvoteby ModernMech4 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
As a user of both windows and mac operating systems, I'd rather the app be consistent between them so I don't have to adopt a different workflow depending on which OS I'm using the app on.
reply
upvoteby bhaak7 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
What’s wrong with something like Qt or wxWidgets for native crossplattform GUI frameworks?
reply
upvoteby joshheitzman7 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms.
reply
upvoteby adastra224 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
"Consistent across platforms" is not a user requirement.
reply
upvoteby bryanlarsen7 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Is consistent results what you want? non-native controls look and behave funny on iOS, and the iOS look on any other platform is annoying.
reply
upvoteby ogoffart5 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
There is also Slint that'd fir perfectly. Others have built game launcher with it as well
reply
upvoteby sensanaty10 minutes ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Except EGS's slop garbage is 400MB on linux
reply
upvoteby freakynit6 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Like these https://goodapps.store/

Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.

reply
upvoteby Kuyawa5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Much better it can give us just webview in wry and winit without tauri bloat
reply
upvoteby AlienRobot7 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Tauri doesn't solve the problems Electron solves. It just externalizes the solution so things can subtly stop working randomly.
reply
upvoteby sick_of_slop4 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
[dead]
reply