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by reactordev 970 days ago
As someone who has contributed to Electron alternatives, I welcome it. Electron.js is so large, binary size wise, that we should be picking the right web-app stack for the job. Webview for example, to allow one to write web-apps in C++ with bindings for other languages.

Personally, go’s ability to serve content from its own binary using the `embed` package is one of the most killer features. I can ship a single binary and have my entire client packed inside. All at 28mb.
2 comments
FireInsight 970 days ago
This isn't an electron alternative, though, right?

There's atleast https://wails.io/ for Go, and https://tauri.app/ for rust ofc.

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reactordev 970 days ago
No, it’s not an alternative. It’s a runtime for doing PWA’s using Go for WASM targets. Not even the same thing. But, if you’re doing go on the back, and now go on the front, there’s very little glue required for a full-stack standalone go app with a beautifully complex HTML UI.

So yeah, it’s not an electron alternative, but another arrow in the quiver to get Golang to be taken seriously outside of microservice/system-land. It deserves more. It’s not Rust, but it should be easier to build apps with Go for distribution.

This package though can help some folks bridge the gap between WebGL/WebGPU in Go WASM and their HTMX UI. I could be entirely mistaken having not used the package before but from what I’ve seen on their docs it should be possible to do full client wasm.

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pjmlp 970 days ago
I rather contribute to pure Web applications.

Most people doing Electron probably never went through the XUL and MSHTML hype cycles.

Electron will eventually join them.

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reactordev 970 days ago
Find me another way to build cross platform applications with a consistent look and feel that isn’t Qt/C++. Electron sucks but it’s filling a gap left by the desktop api teams. As said, there’s others instead of electron. The post here is about building wasm pages as a PWA. So it’s something you could use for pure web applications (in go).
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pjmlp 970 days ago
You mean the knowledge gap of laziness.

By the way, Electron also requires C++.

That is how VSCode is actually usable.

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cdelsolar 970 days ago
Wails
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