by Exoristos
6 subcomments
- The lengths we will go to avoid writing a proper desktop application.
- We built a background daemon as a macOS menu bar app in Go, and the performance was surprisingly bad. The Go bindings for native UI frameworks ended up being massive RAM hogs. When we profiled it, we found that the GC essentially gave up under load, which explained why customers were reporting a simple menu bar app consuming 2.5GB+ of RAM on their Macs. We eventually abandoned the Go approach and switched to Electron. (Not-so) Surprisingly, both the DX and UX improved significantly for our use case. Personally, I’d still prefer Swift/C#/C++ for native desktop work (coming from a Qt C++ background), but given the business constraints at the time, Electron ended up being the most pragmatic choice.
- I really enjoyed building small apps with wails.
Even though people would prefer that we all used native UI frameworks, the DX is simply incomparable to that of web technologies.
And for most apps using browser based rendering won't be an issue. People often underestimate how optimized mondern browsers really are. And because Chromium is not shipped the bundle size is managable.
Not wanting to use JS on the backend I tried both Tauri and Wails and found the simplicity of Go to just work perfectly for my use-cases
- Oh the reference to Rails made me ponder how long have we come after the initial Joyent Slingshot vision for desktop apps based on, yes you guessed, Ruby on Rails.
- Have a look at Fyne as well [0], which is a Go-only native UI toolkit.
0 - https://fyne.io
Other discussions:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785556
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478079
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22291150
- Anyone knows how wails v3 is progressing and if they are actually adding mobile support?
- What’s not clear to me for either the readme nor their website, is how does this actually work?
With Electron, for example, a stripped down Chromium is shipped. So what does the web view rendering with this package?
by singularity2001
0 subcomment
- go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest
Why is that hidden behind a click and two walls of text?
- Gio-UI seems to be more suitable for desktop applications because it is native.
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