> One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems.

ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated because it ships a full cross-platform browser (Chromium) in order... well in order to be cross-platform.

Tauri wants to be less bloated, and therefore removes Chromium. Which makes it... not so cross-platform, apparently.

Genuine question: why not going for a JVM-based technology? That's cross-platform, and it doesn't require a web browser / webview to show text.

> why not going for a JVM-based technology? That's cross-platform, and it doesn't require a web browser / webview to show text.

Because then you require the user to install a JVM?

You've been able to package your java apps so to not require that from your users for a very long time, and in the more recent years, with the compartmentalization of the JDK, you've been able to ship a very striped down version of it, and even more recently, an AOT compiled/PGO optimized binary, so nowadays you can ship your instant starting/low footprint/well performing java code without Java/a JVM.

It's been years since I've messed with Java. OpenJDK can do all that? How big are the binaries?

They're pretty big. I've got a fairly basic JavaFX app that's compiled with Graal, and it weighs in at 98MB, or 32MB when zipped.

Not too surprised, but aren't you incidentally also bundling chrome/WebKit on top of that by depending on WebView?

JavaFX supports a WebKit based WebView widget, but it's optional. If you don't use it it's not bundled. If you do then you pay the cost of including the WebKit build which is ~80mb.

In practice the need for WebKit is going down over time. For basic rich text you can render Markdown to JavaFX nodes directly, for more advanced stuff you could transform [X]HTML to FXML, you don't need it for video or audio, there's a native rich text / word processor control these days, and if you can do 3D graphics with a high level scene graph (meshes, lights etc) then you don't need HTML for 3D either.

Still, it's often useful and bandwidth/disk space isn't the problem it once was.

Are you the Mike Hearn from the bitcoin and "history is a scam" fame? Cool to see you here :) I somehow am (positively!) surprised to see your name in relation to Java GUI frameworks. Hydraulic Conveyor looks interesting, is it planned to support GraalVM's native-image? Would it work with Scala/ScalaFX?

Yes I think you can compile Scala and ScalaFX apps down to native binaries this way. Look at Gluon Substrate:

https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate

One of our customers is experimenting with shipping such apps with Conveyor. There's a discussion ongoing here:

https://github.com/hydraulic-software/conveyor/discussions/6...

We got a console hello world working, albeit the DX is a bit rough. You need some ugly config boilerplate and some additional Native Image json files. But, it works, at least enough to create a Mac package with the regular Conveyor feature set. There are some limits though. I think the WebView doesn't work when the app is natively compiled this way. There's also someone in our Discord who has been trying it with Compose apps.

If it all starts working well it could be quite interesting for desktop app development, as suddenly you could use high level languages and portable UI toolkits but with the sort of startup time, performance and memory usage you'd expect from native apps (modulo binary size which is still quite large). If you want to use HTML as the UI then you can use the Chromium Embedding Framework, which would give you an Electron-like experience but with many more available languages:

https://hydraulic.dev/blog/13-deploying-apps-with-jcef.html

For a Slack competitor like Linen it would make more sense to use web UI because of the video calling/WebRTC stuff. OTOH if you don't care about that, it'd be (imo) easier and more direct to not use HTML. Proper GUI toolkits give you a lot of stuff out of the box like virtualized list views which HTML still doesn't; useful for scrolling over huge datasets like chat logs.

I've been using JVM GUI for years for various tasks. It was appropriate for Bitcoin tasks because it's immune to injection attacks, because you can run everything locally with P2P protocols like the original Bitcoin app did, it's portable etc. Also I learned GUI programming decades ago and find classical UI toolkit concepts like VBox, HBox, StackPane, TableView etc more intuitive than HTML.