Re:Building a Slack alternative with Rust/Tauri
by cmrdporcupine on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @08:18AM
(#36417512)
I tried this same approach (embedded webview instead of e.g. electron -- https://github.com/rdaum/vstwebview) for something last year and I agree the biggest problem is Linux support, specifically WebKit GTK.
On Windows, and to a lesser degree on the Mac, this approach actually went pretty smoothly. But WebKit GTK introduces all sorts of problems -- having to tie into GTK's event loop even though you don't want it, dealing with distribution variances, event binding issues, etc.
I suspect the answer here for Tauri is that someone needs to expend the effort to come up with a good Rust crate bundling of Chromium or Gecko or etc that isn't tied into GTK. Yes, it would defeat the "just use the platform's webview instead of bundling" line, but really it would only be a concern for Linux.
On Windows, and to a lesser degree on the Mac, this approach actually went pretty smoothly. But WebKit GTK introduces all sorts of problems -- having to tie into GTK's event loop even though you don't want it, dealing with distribution variances, event binding issues, etc.
I suspect the answer here for Tauri is that someone needs to expend the effort to come up with a good Rust crate bundling of Chromium or Gecko or etc that isn't tied into GTK. Yes, it would defeat the "just use the platform's webview instead of bundling" line, but really it would only be a concern for Linux.