this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Programming
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I wish we went the other way around: build for native and compile to HTML/CSS/WASM.
For me the disadvantage of Electron is well, it doesn't have any advantage or performance improvement over the browser version for 99% of use cases, and when you shove that on a mobile phone it performs as horribly as the web version.
People already use higher level components that ends up shitting out HTML and CSS anyway, why not skip the middleman and just render the box optimally from the start? Web browsers have become good, but if you can skip parsing HTML and CSS entirely and also skip maintaining their state, that's even better.
I had the misfortune of developing a React Native app, and I'd say thinking in terms of rows and columns and boxes was nice. Most of RN's problems are because they still run JS and so you have to bundle node and have the native messaging bridge, and of course that it's tied to the turd that is React. But zero complains about the UI part when it doesn't involve the bridge: very smooth and snappy, much more than the browser. And the browser version was no different than standard React in performance.
I like that it's not yet another Chromium one at least.
https://egui.rs/ promises to be able to do this, although I'm not positive it's ready for primetime
egui is cool but it's an immediate UI kind of thing, that's usually used in video games as you're constantly re-rendering the whole thing anyway.
A more fitting UI library would be Iced, which is also what System76 is building their COSMIC desktop environment on.
It does claim to support the web too, although not via HTML which brings some accessibility concerns. I'd expect performance to be very good otherwise.