Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI

h4ch1•about 2 hours ago

> Use the system WebView for lightweight apps, or bundle Chromium via CEF

so basically a vibe coded Tauri in zig? I don't like calling webview dependent applications "native desktop apps".

Native desktop apps means using the OS primitives and directives to draw the UI imo; WinForms, SwiftUI, and their ilk.

thayne•about 1 hour ago

Maybe it's called zero native because that is how native it is.

aiscoming•about 2 hours ago

I love the redefinition of "native desktop app" - a web app which uses the system web-view instead of bundling Chrome.

AbuAssar•about 2 hours ago

> No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No fighting the compiler for 20 minutes over a string.

I don’t like this attitude, both zig and rust have their strengths.

DeathArrow•about 1 hour ago

I would take Zig over Rust any time. It simply fits the way I think much much better.

And since 0.16/0.17 Zig introduced a very nice async/concurrency system that doesn't require function coloring. While async in Rust still feels strange and not well integrated.

nurettin•about 1 hour ago

Rust has bad ergonomics. You will see that "attitude" as long as coding exists, or lifetimes are fixed in a way to allow you to omit them in contexts which are not concurrent or are embarrassingly parallelizable.

iamcalledrob•27 minutes ago

Using the "system WebView" is not a positive on Linux.

For some reason that always means WebKitGTK, which is crummy.

Someone, anyone, please get CEF working with GTK4.

iamsaitam•15 minutes ago

zero examples

jerleth•about 1 hour ago

Sounds very similar to webui (zig version: https://github.com/webui-dev/zig-webui)

What is the difference?

norskeld•about 1 hour ago

Given this is from Vercel and most likely vibe coded (hopefully not), I wonder how many zero-day vulnerabilities will be there... :^)

vijaybritto•about 2 hours ago

Im not sure if people are getting the biggest problem in electron desktop apps.

Its RAM usage not the disk!!

Why are they all making the same thing in different ways?! I have never worked on an electron app where the executable size was an impediment to the business. Its always the RAM/CPU usage. If we are going to work on the same webviews like electron and others, how will this make any difference?

cosmotic•about 2 hours ago

Using the system webview theoretically saves memory. Though it's still not great.

Bolwin•about 2 hours ago

Cause they all share one webview. Electron apps each run their own version of chromium

DeathArrow•about 1 hour ago

Still, using system's native GUI should be more performant and use less memory.

I would rather see existing Zig GUI libraries using system's GUI primitives improving. With LLM GUI stuff should be simple enough and we don't need to rely on people web expertise to build desktop apps.

boxed•about 1 hour ago

No screenshot examples even? :/

Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews