HACKER Q&A
📣 sebastianconcpt

Tauri or Node-GUI?


I'm searching for an Electron alternative to create a native desktop app using Svelte as renderer. Should do it with Tauri or node-GUI?

PS: the app is an IDE that connects to remote Smalltalk backends.

  👤 d--b Accepted Answer ✓
If you're looking for something to deliver an app you can share/sell, you should still do Electron. Tauri is still quite early and I don't know about node-gui (likely the same).

Electron is stable and has figured out all the quirks of delivering apps to windows and macos (packaging, signing, notarizing, etc.) which are a massive pain in the butt. The memory usage is terrible, but at least, you can deliver something.

👤 hardwaresofton
Tauri was really good when I used it.

I can say that the ecosystem around Tauri is pretty darn good, despite how early it is, and Rust at the back is encouraging to me at least -- I'm much happier to write the back bits in Rust than anything else.

I planned to write an article about it (what I ran into, the architecture that worked for me to support multiple platforms with reusable parts, etc), but haven't.

Unfortunately I haven't tried Node-GUI so I can't comment on it.

There's the fundamental difference of how they work though -- Tauri is webviews and Node-GUI is rendering to QT so I think this is maybe the biggest axis to evaluate against.