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0 pointsivanmontillam3y ago0 comments

> I don't see why rendering this in Electron (which is essentially just a bundled Chromium browser) would perform differently than in a standalone browser.

WebView2 has further optimizations as claimed by Microsoft in their recent blog post about Microsoft Teams[0]: "The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge. Additionally, we have been able to take greater advantage of the native capabilities provided by WebView2 and ensure support for more up-to-date versions of Chromium (latest performance and security updates)."

So, I'd assume WebView2 is better than Electron.

> What you'd get is significantly smaller binary size but most people don't care much about that.

In the case of Sciter (quoted in my parent comment), Sciter is a bit different: The frontend is HTML, CSS and JS, but the app's local backend is whatever you want it to be: C#, C++, Python, Assembly, etc. That's why it's popular among performance-critical software such as malware scanners, where you need native performance but as well as a you know customers that like a nice UI.

Any kind of software could benefit from Sciter's approach, if just companies liked to drop a bit more of budget at their shipped products.

[0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

0 comments

eis3y ago

You said Electron would kill the performance gains of Perspective. You also said it would make a workstation fans spin somehow.

The performance gains in rendering of Perspective are due to using canvas + Webassembly. This would be exactly the same in Tauri or Webview2 because it would run in the same browser rendering engines which execute the Canvas renderer and Webassembly like in a browser or in Electron.

> The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge.

That's exactly pretty much where the benefits end. The memory usage reduction is even debatable if you are not running Edge as your browser. See WebView2 as an installed Electron core that's pre-installed on Windows. Doesn't change rendering performance.

> In the case of Sciter (quoted in my parent comment), Sciter is a bit different: The frontend is HTML, CSS and JS, but the app's local backend is whatever you want it to be: C#, C++, Python, Assembly, etc. That's why it's popular among performance-critical software such as malware scanners, where you need native performance but as well as a you know customers that like a nice UI.

Yea that's why I didn't list Sciter in my reply. With Sciter you don't get the system webview - you get a custom minimalistic web html/css rendering engine that supports a limited subset of the HTML5/CSS3 spec. There's no WebGL and there's no Webassembly. So you'd have to bring your own libraries for that. Easy enough with Webassembly and they could even skip that part and go native but with Canvas and trying to run on all major platforms... it's just a lot of added work for minor gains.

I'm not against libraries like Tauri. Perspective could totally use that to make a desktop app. It would not have any advantage when it comes to rendering performance though.