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by devgoldm 1893 days ago
As a primarily C++ dev who's been using nodejs on the side for about a couple years now - so forgive me if this is naive - but am I wrong in seeing Deno as a potential Electron replacement with standalone binary builds + webview?

If so, the introduction of interactive permission prompts is pretty cool.

I see a few comments from more experienced web developers that are quite negative about Deno that seem to generally be centred around the fact it offers very little compared to nodejs, and isn't worth the effort to learn.

Does it have potential as a safer, lightweight Electron alternative? Or are there better options than Deno in that regard?

3 comments

> Does it have potential as a safer, lightweight Electron alternative? Or are there better options than Deno in that regard?

If they target this, the big chunk of code will still be the same ones on Electron, so i don't think it would get to be safer or lightweight as compared to Electron.

there's webgl, webgpu, and dom, but it's a headless dom (jsdom) not a webview.

I wouldn't be surprised to see packages developed for a webview but atm demo seems to target server side web platform compatibility... except rendering html!

I wouldn't be surprised to see some packages try to fill the gap, & deno has a much stronger basis for implementation than node (a rpc layer between rust & v8 defines the core character of the project, and an native addon that adds webview methods to the rpc would be natural in Deno, vs a hack in electron).

The most updated webview bindings I know of for deno: https://github.com/webview/webview_deno

It's likely you will find some hiccups in latest deno release because it uses rust plug-ins and they are getting overhauled at the moment. Maybe a few more months before getting stabilized.

I think it's not its main goal right now, but it could be and would be really interesting if it happened.