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by pbronez 712 days ago
Cool!

Surprised to hear you started with a native UI and pivoted to electron. What was the major blocker there?

I recently got frustrated with OpenSCAD and decided to try CadQuery and Build123d. The modeling backend is a big step forward, but the GUI is not nearly as good as OpenSCAD. I managed to get it working via VSCode with a plugin, but I’m dreaming of embedding everything in a dedicated MacOS app so I can jump into CAD work without hacking through dev setup.
1 comments
jackhodkinson 712 days ago
There aren't many great production-ready open-source frameworks for code-editor components in Swift. I assessed quite a few but found that the feature completeness was far from what I needed. I tried to fork [CodeEditSourceEditor](https://github.com/CodeEditApp/CodeEditSourceEditor) and add the extra features I wanted, but I think it would have taken me 6-12 months to get it to an acceptable state, meanwhile not spending any time focusing on the rest of the product experience.

I decided to play around with Typescript and Electron over a weekend and ended up getting a really solid prototype so I made the heart wrenching decision to move over.

I'm messing around with writing my own text editor component in Swift now, but it's quite a big endeavour to get the standard expected for a production ready product.

I'm assuming a pure-swift CAD UI would be equally difficult. Would be really cool to see that tho.

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rjurney 712 days ago
Don't listen to the grinches that stole Swift. Electron is fine. We have lots of RAM. Just make it good. Data scientists won't care.
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cageface 712 days ago
FWIW I've had good experiences with Tauri so far. It's great being able to call back easily into Rust code and I haven't had any real issues with the wrapped web view.

At this point I'd start with Tauri first and only switch to Electron only if I really need something only Chrome supports or if I need to support Linux. I guess the webview story there is not so good.

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harshitaneja 712 days ago
Tauri supports linux.
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westurner 710 days ago
tauri-apps/tauri: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri :

> The user interface in Tauri apps currently leverages tao as a window handling library on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. To render your application, Tauri uses WRY, a library which provides a unified interface to the system webview, leveraging WKWebView on macOS & iOS, WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux and Android System WebView on Android. ... Tauri GitHub action: https://tauri.app/v1/guides/building/cross-platform/#tauri-g...

WebView: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebView

CEF: Chromium Embedded Framework > External Projects: https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef#external-projects : cefglue, cefpython,: https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython

(edit)

tauri-apps/wry > Bundle Chromium Renderer; Chromium WebView like WebView2 (Edge (Chromium)) https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/1064#issuecomment-2...

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cageface 712 days ago
Right but from what I've read the webview it uses there is way less stable and featureful than Windows or Mac. I haven't actually tried it myself.
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