Depends on what you are building, but overall I'd say the friction is minimal. For a lot of apps you won't even need to care about Rust whatsoever as you just use a bunch of fairly standard JS/TS api's.
On the Rust side it's also quite nice, easy to make plugins, good api's, all the goodies.
If you do use both the bridge can cause some friction because of serialization. I have personally not had any problems with it. Also good to note that in v2 (is in beta) they are improving this.
What are your requirements? Performance, development speed, native look and feel, ... Which languages are you familiar with? Do you have a preference with regards to the language?
I have good experience with https://wails.io. It uses a Go backend and a JavaScript frontend with Go functions exposed to the JavaScript side, and events with senders and listeners on both sides. All without the enormous bloat of Electron.
On the JavaScript side you can use whatever you like: plain JavaScript, react, vue, svelte, … whatever you’re familiar with.
And it can cross compile to Windows, Mac and Linux, so all major platforms covered.
Allows the building of dynamic, complex UIs within OS hosted windows
Included controls for text display, combo boxes, buttons, sliders, list boxes
Supports full transparency, overlays, controls with shadows/highlights outside of their range
Fully themeable (uses LICE for compositing)
Personal projects, Racket with gui-easy. Close to frictionless GUI development, very nice language(-platform) to build with. Excellent metaprogramming.
Professionally, Java and JavaFX. Decent multi-platform story, there's a config flag for tuning everything, and there's a library for pretty much anything anyone has ever had an issue with and when they don't fit as well as you'd like you just tear it up with reflection and fix.
1 app 1 jar. I beat Maven until I get a JAR-file that boots outside the development repo. Usually this involves unhooking the module system.
What kind of bugs are you encountering? I have some trouble with layouts being weird sometimes but it usually sorts itself out when I make them simpler.
There is no source since it's not true. The product manager of Flutter/Dart said on Twitter that there was no change in team size, only some DevOps roles moving to other (likely cheaper) locations.
In general for a great experience on the desktop you want to use the native stack of each platform, so C# / Windows SDK in Windows, GTK in most Linux distros and whatever Mac officially recommends.
You could use electron and build cross platform apps using web technologies, but I'm yet to use an electron based app that doesn't feel like crap.
VS Code is electron and it has been optimized to the hilt. I have used it on Mac, Windows and Linux and the experience is uniformly great. It feels native on every platform (responsiveness is not as snappy as vim but it’s good enough and I’m getting a lot of extra features in return, like remote for instance)
But it didn’t come for free. I can tell a lot of engineering hours were spent fixing little issues like different/conflicting keystroke mappings in all 3 platforms.
And the result is noticeable. Electron is becoming synonymous to shoddily built apps. Even though you can write buggier apps with native SDK, but the amount of works that been put into them elevates the final result. Not so much with Electron.
Yeah, just like Unity is becoming synonymous with shitty asset-flip games -- because it puts making games within reach of the laziest and least competent among us.
Electron has democratized desktop app development and put it within reach of everybody -- but having bad apps on it doesn't make it bad in itself. Remember, the most-used programmers' editor is also an Electron app!
with no additional context when running on mac/linux/windows, I like boring technologies, doing everything within python running locally while rendering everything in the user's default web browser with basic HTML/js/css
Most ideas that could be desktop apps would be just as good as web apps or browser extensions.
For myself Ive been using libui-ng.github.io/libui-ng/ for a few projects lately
I disagree. They might be "better" from the point of view of the developer, but from the user's perspective, web apps are often much worse.
- Needlessly ties the app to the web / Internet connectivity in order to work (a disadvantage unless the application's purpose involves queries over the Internet).
- The application can change on you without warning and without you taking a deliberate step to update, including adding unwanted functionality and removing wanted functionality.
- You can be denied access to the application remotely (this is also true for native applications that require an account to work).
- Look and feel inconsistent with the rest of your applications / operating system.
I'm not talking about USB/hardware apps, games, or anything demanding.
What I have in mind is the majority of Electron/Tauri/Flutter apps I've seen on GitHub could have been just as good as web apps.
(Not trying to dunk on them, most are probably experiments for learning.)
First, compiling and releasing for OSX/Linux/Windows is a nightmare. It's way easier to deploy a web app. Not only for yourself but it's better for users. People get weirded out when they need to run an exe. And for Macs you need to go into settings and allow your unauthenticated app to run, unless you can sign the app yourself.
And for Linux some people don't know they need to mark an AppImage executable to run it.
And if you choose a bulky toolkit like Electron/Tauri/Flutter and in some cases Qt, your app will probably eat up more memory than a web app. And also the final binary users need to download will be big.
So I recommend making a web app if you can, unless your idea fundamentally requires demanding hardware/IO usage/graphics/etc.
