alt Hacker NewsBesides going full native, a Tauri [0] app might have been another good alternative given they already use Rust. There are pros and cons to that choice, of course, and perhaps Tauri was considered and not chosen. Tauri plus Extism [1] would have been interesting, enabling polyglot plugin development via wasm. For Extism see also the list of known implementations [2].
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I have been using Tauri for a macOS app I'm making[1] and it has been great. The app is only 11MB and I've had most of the APIs I'd need.
However, there are still some rough edges that have been annoying to work with. I think for my next project I will actually go back to electron. There are two issues that caused me pain:
1. I can't use Playwright to run e2e tests on the tauri app itself. That's because the webview doesn't expose the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and the tauri-driver [2] does not work on MacOS.
2. Security Scoped Resources aren't fully implemented which means if a user gets the app through the app store the app won't be able to remember file permissions between runs [3]. It's not too much of an issue since I probably won't release it on the app store, but still annoying.
But I hope Tauri continues to grow and we start seeing apps use it more.
I find it a bit odd how much people talk up the Rust aspect of Tauri. For most cases you'll be writing a Typescript frontend and relying on boilerplate Rust + plugins for the backend. And I'd think most of the target audience would see that as a good thing.
+1 for Tauri, I've been using it for my recent vibe-coded experimental apps. Making rust the "center of gravity" for the app lets me use the best of all worlds:
- declarative-ish UI in typescript with react
- rust backend for performance-sensitive operations
- I can run a python sidecar, bundled with the app, that lets me use python libraries if I need it
If I can and it makes sense to, I'll pull functionality into rust progressively, but this give me a ton of flexibility and lets me use the best parts of each language/platform.
Its fast too and doesn't use a ton of memory like electron apps do.
I use something similar to Tauri called Wails: https://wails.io/ that's Go-based.
My team is building a cross platform app with Tauri that is mobile, web, and desktop in one codebase and we've had almost nothing bad to say. It's been great. Also the executable size and security are amazing. Rust is nice. Haven't done as much with it yet but it will come in useful soon as we plan to implement on-device AI models that are faster in Rust than WebGPU.