Tauri – Electron alternative written in Rust
Lot of talk on how it's a bad idea to use web tech for desktop apps because bloat.<p>Web tech is ultimately an API. APIs don't create bloat, developers do.<p>What is missing (or unknown) is tooling to avoid bloat.<p>One could have something like a compiler of sorts that analyses the HTML+CSS+JS of an app to be packaged and generates just enough code to implement what's actually in use. It only needs to implement the semantic (for example no need for a CSS parser in the app if the CSS is not generated on the fly in response to user interaction, it can compile straight to layout code).<p>Even packaging an existing browsing engine, it should be possible with a bit care (no aggressive use of runtime generated code and the like) to make an advanced dead code remover that recompiles the embedded browser without all the stuff the app being packaged does not use (e.g. no video => no video decoding code, no use of CSS feature XYZ => not compiled in). It could even be brute forced in the presence of an exhaustive test suite: for each function in the embedded browser, replace the body with an exception, run the test suite, remove if it passes, repeat.<p>This also applies to GTK or Qt which suffer the same problem as electron (must be co-packaged with the distro, or compiled on): with efficient dead code removal you could make AppImages (or similar all-in formats) that are not zillions megabytes each.