Settings

Theme

Electrobun v1: Build fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop apps with TypeScript

blackboard.sh

4 points by merlindru 3 hours ago · 2 comments

Reader

merlindruOP 3 hours ago

I'm building a commercial macOS app with Electrobun. I have previously written the same app with Tauri. I'll say that, while I love Tauri, using Electrobun has been an absolute breeze. I got the same app done in roughly 70% of the time[1]. It's a very productive stack. In no small part due to Electrobun, but also the fact that Bun has tons of DX niceties and a builtin bundler.

Electrobun lets you open/manipulate/close webview windows and communicate with them using typed rpc. It also handles building, code signing, and notarization.

And because I'm using Bun, running an HMR + React + Tailwind server is just one command (`bun ./index.html`) or like 5 lines of code. Pass --console and the webview's console.log()s get streamed to your Terminal too.

There's tons of other things Electrobun does that I haven't even mentioned, because I haven't interacted much with them yet. E.g. I know that it lets you show platform-native notifications, prompts/popups, etc.

There also is a very impressive updating mechanism that relies on a bsdiff implementation written in Zig. You just ship the deltas, so updates to very large apps are just a few KBs most of the time.

It's genuinely a very productive stack and impressive piece of tech.

[1]: The API and implementation was clear, so I'll cautiously say this is not a case of "rewrites are always faster". In fact, the Tauri version was a rewrite too :)

maddada an hour ago

Looks very promising, will be building my next project with it. Full TS stack is where I'm most productive. I'm glad we now have a more performant and lean alternative to Electron while not needing to deal with Rust and long compilation steps.

Keyboard Shortcuts

j
Next item
k
Previous item
o / Enter
Open selected item
?
Show this help
Esc
Close modal / clear selection