> As you’d expect, this makes Tauri apps far more lightweight.
Note that lightweight compared to Electron does not mean it's actually lightweight. In my experience, Tauri apps are still pretty heavy and a constant drain on system resources; maybe they're 2x better (faster/lighter) compared to an Electron equivalent, but they're still at least 10x worse compared to native apps.
With a Tauri-based app (just like with Electron), I have to constantly remember to close the app at the soonest possible point in time, or I can tangibly feel the sluggishness it creates in the system performance. So if there's a native choice and a Tauri-written choice, I'd heavily prefer the native choice nowadays, even at the cost of some features.
I'm curious what the impact on system resources is between a Tauri-based app versus the web app version opened in a browser window. If the features for both are the same, I imagine the resource utilization is also the same. The only exception might be that browsers such as Chrome will force inactive tabs to sleep.
Readwise Reader is one app I've compared both versions to, and I don't see much difference in resource usage for either version.
Last time I messed with Tauri my bin folder in my code/building directory ballooned to 10 gigs. If the final product is “lightweight” the development process surely is not.
There is no tradeoff. The bloat of Rust is caused by its NPM-style ecosystem where everything has 1000 dependencies, which is completely orthogonal to performance.
Cargo's cache is ridiculously massive (half of which is debug info: zero-cost abstractions have full-cost debug metadata), but you can delete it after building.
There's new-ish build.build-dir setting that lets you redirect Cargo's temp junk to a standard system temp/cache directory instead of polluting your dev dir.
> There's new-ish build.build-dir setting that lets you redirect Cargo's temp junk to a standard system temp/cache directory instead of polluting your dev dir.
If it’s just logs, I would prefer to redirect it to /dev/null.
Note that lightweight compared to Electron does not mean it's actually lightweight. In my experience, Tauri apps are still pretty heavy and a constant drain on system resources; maybe they're 2x better (faster/lighter) compared to an Electron equivalent, but they're still at least 10x worse compared to native apps.
With a Tauri-based app (just like with Electron), I have to constantly remember to close the app at the soonest possible point in time, or I can tangibly feel the sluggishness it creates in the system performance. So if there's a native choice and a Tauri-written choice, I'd heavily prefer the native choice nowadays, even at the cost of some features.