Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI

ggedy about 5 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on zero-native.dev

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Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 555 words in the discussion.

Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

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.

popcorncowboy•44 minutes ago

"Not native" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily (dot com is available for a few grand). Concept is solid, an ingenious name even.

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.

feverzsj•11 minutes ago

Considering Microsoft already doing this in win11, it's fine.

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.

pmarreck•about 1 hour ago

> "I don't like this attitude"

Cool, let me know when you have a rational counterargument then, some of us have gotten fed up with Rust (especially at scale) and are very much enjoying Zig (which has no magic, which turns out to be a huge advantage at scale)

ramon156•27 minutes ago

"No borrow checker" id not a reason to switch to Zig, unless you have a reason that borrow checker is limiting you from developing, hence the "I don't like this attitude". Just give the reason, not the "solution"

Not to mention we're nitpicking over something that an LLM wrote.

adastra22•about 1 hour ago

Ok have fun. The rest of us are having no problems.

nurettin•about 2 hours 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.

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.

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... :^)

iamcalledrob•29 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.

jerleth•about 1 hour ago

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

What is the difference?

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?

mpweiher•5 minutes ago

Easy: the problem with memory is not the WebView nor is it displaying HTML using that WebView. The problem is the layers of layers of JavaScript (frameworks) running in that WebView when using Electron or the like.

I am working on something similar, HTMXNative as part of a bigger idea called interscri.pt that can use either WebView or native for rendering and the difference in memory consumption is somewhere between minimal (or even undetectable) and modest.

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

iamsaitam•17 minutes ago

zero examples

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.

thayne•about 1 hour ago

Unfortunately, all the native "system" GUI frameworks are all terrible in their own unique ways.

Unless you mean drawing the gui directly to a graphics surface, which often results in even poor accessibility and system integration unless the developer cares a lot about that and puts a lot of effort into it.

boxed•about 1 hour ago

No screenshot examples even? :/