[natemcintosh]

Tried it out on Linux. Worked better than I expected. Sites that are text heavy render well, and quickly. Sites with more "customization" sometimes struggled with rendering; stuff all over the place. Memory usage seemed a bit higher than Firefox with the same tabs, but not out of this world higher.

All in all, an impressive release.

[brokencode]

It’s still a ways off, but I’m excited for the possibility of something like Tauri using Servo natively instead of needing host browsers. A pure Rust desktop app stack with only a single browser to target sounds fantastic.

[qzw]

But then we have the same complaint against Electron, namely large deployment sizes and no shared memory, no?

[Octoth0rpe]

this part is important: > A pure Rust desktop app stack

I think the parent is imagining a desktop with servo available as a standard lib, in which case you're left with the same complaints as Tauri, not electron; that the system version of Servo might be out of date.

[brokencode]

Yeah, multiple Tauri apps could theoretically share a Servo library.

Though I’d also be interested to see how slim it could be with static linking.

Presumably a lot of code could be compiled out with dead code analysis? Or compile flags could remove old compatibility cruft and unneeded features?

[niutech]

For rust desktop apps, why target a web engine, when we have much more lightweight native GUI frameworks? We don't need yet another bloated Electron.

[brokencode]

One nice thing about targeting a web engine is that your application could potentially run in browsers too. Lots of Electron applications do this.

Also you get to take advantage of the massive amount of effort that goes into web engines for accessibility, cross-platform consistency, and performance.

Electron is a memory hog, but actually very powerful and productive. There’s a reason why VSCode, Discord, and many others use it.

But yeah, I wouldn’t say no to a native Rust desktop stack similar to Qt. I know there are options at various levels of sophistication that I’m curious about but haven’t explored in depth.

[niutech]

If it runs in a web browser, why bother Electron if you can just install a standalone web app in Chromium-based browsers (or Firefox with PWA extension)? I do this with Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail and they use less RAM since they reuse a shared web engine.

[brokencode]

Some applications benefit from the host integration. VSCode in particular, since it interacts with the terminal and other applications. I'm also assuming 1Password benefits from it as well for full OS integration.

[niutech]

But then they don't need to be made as Electron apps, but rather native apps, which use a fraction of resources. Compare e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ with VS Code.