I decided to adventure myself in Tauri development for a personal project, I read the entire Rust official book and followed the exercises. When I first started developing it was like if nothing I learned helped for real life projects.
Now after getting betting up every single time I touch my project, it seems I’m catching things slowly.
But I’ve never seen such a hard modern language, I used C and C++ before and it’s incomparable.
If your code touches sensitive stuff (eg. public networking) and needs to be low level, probably Rust (or another compiled memory safe language). Otherwise, just use C++.
But then what’s the point of Tauri? I mean there are plenty general use projects in Tauri, why’d they chose Rust?
Once you’ve learned it, Rust is just a very nice compiled language to work with.
You get higher level constructs than in C++, a language without a billion weird edge cases, a modern package manager, and much more. In my experience, my code written in Rust is more likely to work as intended, both because of the stricter compile-time checks, but also because language features like sum types make it easier to check the core logic at compile time.
I work in both C++ and Rust, among other languages, but these days I never reach for C++ for a new project
Do you really need tauri?
Tauri is for web devs that want to make GUIs with web tech in rust. You can do GUIs without web tech.
If you really want to make a GUI with rust, you can use iced.
If you just want a GUI with web tech, do it in JavaScript+html.
If you want a GUI without web tech and don’t care the language, use a GUI toolkit for your preferred language.
Learning a GUI toolkit is hard. Learning a language is hard. Learning both at the same time is even harder than the sum.
Tauri provides native system plugins cross platform, that’s what I want, paired with the fact it doesn’t bundle Chromium, apps are lightweight and fast.
You can use Tauri with Iced too, it doesn’t require web tech, the strong point of Tauri is the native system modules.
I thought about using native tools only but I’m planning on supporting Linux and Windows at the same time, so that’s the appealing for me.
I don’t know what kind of a GUI you’re building, but there are simpler options than Tauri out there. Slint comes to mind.
The GUI isn’t important to be honest, just anything that doesn’t look too outdated. I’m more interested on cross-platform native plugins, so I don’t need to write all by hand. Slint seems to be less libre than Tauri, there are pricing on their website, even tho I understand it’s free, still, I prefer to keep it away from strongly backed by individual company, especially if I don’t know it well.
“plugins” is not a feature. What plugin specifically do you need? Most probably you can accomplish whatever you need with a library and iced. Plugin is just a fancy word for library.
Plugin are a feature when it provides cross platform abstraction for Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS.
Doing it natively means I need to make a few thousands of extra ifs and maintain all different ifs for each platform, while Tauri provides it out of the box. Such as notifications, filesystem access, file opener, auto start, window management and etc…
There are plenty of cross-platform libraries in rust. In fact, most of them are. Since Rust is cross-platform at its core.
Tauri is for using webtech with rust irc.
So if you want to use rust in combination with JS frameworks like reakt you use tauri.
A fake sense of security by pretending that simple apps that don’t expose low level interfaces and use wrapping libraries for all parts of networking need to be implemented by-design memory language, or for people who just like rust.