Wails – Electron Alternative Powered by Go (opens in new tab)

I thought the music was cool too. I'd kinda like to see it in more project READMEs. Obviously not half the page, but a nice little section of mentions. Could be a cool way to find new music.

That was probably from back in the day. Hardcore Goland user now! The music was more to promote bands that some people would never have heard of.

I disagree and maybe I'm not 'fun', but to me there's a lot of garbage in this README. Scrolling through the plaintext document with lists of badges, manually managed table of contents, photos of contributors, miscellaneous HTML, you can see that there's so much content that isn't helping you understand the project—things that should be I a homepage or separate dedicated file. I can't read this without rendering it. The music while somewhat interesting, I don't think has a place in this document—especially linking out a proprietary music streaming platform.

.vscode committed to a repository is a bit of a warning flag to me. It tells me this repo is doing some non-standard stuff that needs special IDE configuration to account for.

That would be cool, but wouldn't any (full) implementation of the HTML/CSS/JS spec end up as a browser anyways? Unless you narrow the scope and only support a subset of HTML.

The thing is, HTML/CSS/JS is good as a layout paradigm but garbage as an actual GUI layout and language, because they were intended for hypertext documents, not applications.

If you're going to do that, maybe consider versions of those intended to work as a native GUI layer, but which are as easy to develop as the web.

This existed, it was called XUL, and it was glorious

If there is one tech that we need to bring back from the dead, it is XUL

(XUL is the GUI toolkit powering Firefox, or at least was until they ripped almost all of it out and replaced it with "modern" (gag) HTML+CSS UI)

I think you're looking for https://www.areweguiyet.com/ click "webrenderer"

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "without a browser layer"? Would there still be a webview / blink etc. implementation?

I hope not. HTML/CSS were supposed to be used for "hyper text" and "magazine-like" content

isn't that what chrome is? either way QML is kind of what most people seem to be looking for and it's widely used

When you say multiple windows, what do you mean? Both GH links mention using iframes. So do you mean multiple “windows” within the primary application window? Or do you mean multiple primary windows?

Are you talking about tabs? Or multiple windows (like finder/explorer)?

Asked for the same thing, but it's impossible or too hard to do it.

- https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/discussions/1452

- https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/2709

Multiple windows has some interesting nuances but we do aim to tackle that post v2. You would be surprised at just how much is involved in refining something like this, even with just a single window to worry about.

NeutralinoJS supports this, apparently: https://github.com/neutralinojs/neutralinojs/issues/249

Are tabs an option?

Hey there :-) Thanks for making both go-webview2 and winloader, and taking the time to review the PRs. That reminds me, I need to diff where we are at as I think we got out of sync.

What happened to go-webview1?

because it seems go and rust are in a competition, and a rust library of similar fashion just made it to front page. takes off tinfoil hat

sorry, copied from `Tauri 1.0 – Electron Alternative Powered by Rust`, I'm a gopher, so I prefer wails. 2.0 is about to release, but beta works as promised.

Many web apps do not use node.js on the backend, so I don't really think that's the point of electron. It's more that it's a way to develop a cross platform application without having to deal too much with native differences. Being able to leverage web tech for the UI also means you can reuse your companies existing expertise.

In that sense, these alternatives all meet the requirement, as on the UI side they all use standard web technology. The difference is 1) they don't package the entire chrome runtime which saves a lot of memory and 2) they use different backend languages, some of which may match a given companies expertise better. E.g. if you already have a lot of Go or Rust developers, these alternatives might allow you to reuse existing backend code in these languages.

Finally, the experience of developing with the alternatives is often superior to electron. Every time I've setup electron for a new project I've spent days messing with complex tooling. In contrast, at least with wails, I've spent close to zero time on tooling. Ironically, the time I have spent on tooling has been on the javascript side.

Here you are: https://flet.dev - Electron alternative with Flutter-powered UI. We decided to focus on Python first to polish the idea, but Go and C# support are coming!

  > Cymru am byth!

Plzeh nz olgu!

Syt mae? Qatar amdani! :-)

Judging from the logo, it's named after both the country Wales and the application framework Rails.

Awesome logo.

Tenth circle of Hell?

This and Sciter were clearly posted in response to (or to ride on the coattails of) Tauri's 1.0.

Sciter was specifically mentioned in tauri's thread, it's the subject of the top comment. Wener both mentioned wails in response to tauri's announcement, and posted this.

You must break down the part that led to that reputation.

Electron uses its own renderer (chrome). Meaning it can't share memory with the os browser and make download size way bigger. It bundles nodejs. Again make download size bigger Nodejs needs to create multiple processes which each of them can use a lot of memory. It use a bridge between the UI and backend (to do os stuff) while JS is nowaday fast, Go/Java/C#/etc are still faster

Wails on the other hand. Uses the os browser. (Download size is reduce and can share memory) Go is compiled to native, no runtime needed. (Download size is reduce, lower on memory, run faster) Same bridge performance bottleneck, but you can perform critical stuff in Go and get an advantage.

HTML renderers are fast. Code your UI with performance in mind, use a library like svelte or solidjs combine with something like wails (or anything that will do the same thing in java/c#/swift) and you won't see a difference between any native apps in most cases. Also you gain the ability to share your UI code with the web.