tauri vs electron

1. tauri vs electron

1.1. Tauri What is it?

Tauri It's a cross platform GUI frame , And Electron Their ideas are basically similar to .Tauri The front-end implementation of is also based on Web Series language ,Tauri The back end uses Rust.Tauri You can create smaller 、 Run faster 、 More secure cross platform desktop applications .

1.2. Front end view

tauri At this time, the fire is viewed against the background of this time point , I think the most important one is 2 Point is rust and webview2.

rust

• rust How popular is it? There is not much to say here , Just throw a few links ,linux Kernel acceptance rust, deno use rust, Microsoft embraces rust, fuchsia Of rust Code proportion exceeds 50%, Apple In the underlying all-in rust, continuity 6 Year of stackoverflow Most popular language .
• tauri Adopted rust Corresponding electronjs Of nodejs, No, nodejs This runtime, It will be thinner .nodejs The biggest advantage of is asynchronous event driven libuv and js Language .rust be based on future Of tokio Wait for the library to have a comparison ,（ And familiar async await Out of the box ）.rust A strong hug wasm It is very tempting for developers of various languages .
• rust It is positioned as system programming by many developers , For the system api The advantages of integration and invocation are great .
• rust There are many advantages ： Compile time memory security 、 Zero cost abstraction 、 Support high concurrency 、 Rich type system 、 Easy-to-use cargo Package management 、ffi Compile friendly （ and node-gyp More friendly than ）
• The disadvantage is that the learning threshold is high , But for the c/c++ For developers, package management 、 Standard library 、 Compile time memory security is tempting .

webview2

• tauri Rendering libraries used wry stay macos Use Webkit.framework, stay windows The following applies webview2.
• Microsoft webview2 runtime Our support is quite strong . For promotion office application 、outlook And so on ,2021 year 4 The month begins windows 2101 Push above version . The specific coverage data is not clear at present （ Let's see if there is any great God who can reveal ）.
• Different applications can share webview2.electronjs The shared runtime you want to implement is webview2 Realized .
• webview2 runtime 122MB, win11 With pre-installed ,win11 Previous versions can be embedded into the application's installation package , You can reuse unstable versions edge Browser's runtime（ The stable version is not reused ）, It can also be downloaded separately （ recommend , It's different tauri Apps can share runtime).
• webview2 runtime The evergreen model can even be better than electronjs Of chromium Update faster .
• Microsoft's internal desktop applications have gradually changed from electron Switch to webview2.

To make a long story short tauri It's a frame stuck with a point in time , It is a phenomenal framework for the spiral development of desktop applications .

1.3. Open source project author's opinion

As Electron alternatives , There are more and more such frameworks ,tauri Just one of them , They all try to solve Electron Two obvious problems of ：

• The bag is too big , because electron Will automatically insert Chromium and nodejs, A man who does nothing electron After the project is compressed, it will probably 50m.
• Memory consumption is too high , because Chromium It eats memory itself , In addition, it provides access to the operating system nodejs, Considerable memory consumption , Not friendly to gadget projects .

tauri Look at the , No more stuffing Chromium and nodejs, The front end uses the operating system webview, Back end and operating system integration rust Realization , In theory, it should be better than nodejs Be lean and efficient , Similar projects ：

• NeutralinoJS The front end is embedded with a webview, The back end directly implements a c++ Realized http server.
• Chromely The front end is embedded with a CEF, The back-end using .NET.
• electrino and tauri similar , Using the system's webview, And implement a back end (windows The following seems to be based on .NET).
• go-astilectron Still based on Electron, But the back end is replaced by go Language .
• wails webview+go Backend

But the problem with such projects is ： immature , Basically, just look at the documents , As a solution for developing desktop applications , Operating system access api Very few , Not even ( Or no documentation ？), It is difficult to develop a formal project , But it's worth paying attention to , Once mature , replace Electron There is great hope .