This was recently on HN and I think it adds so much value to GPUI: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component/

TLDR; I'm keeping an eye on using LibWeb instead, which promises to be less bloated

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Honestly, we're solving the wrong problem by using something like Electron, webit, Tauri, etc. We're aiming for perfect feature parity with web browsers.

Instead, I want a good way to declare my UI in a subset of HTML, a subset of CSS and optionally a subset of Javascript. That's it, as far as web support goes. I don't need support for 1999 HTML/CSS, or special cases for animation in CSS, etc.

What I actually need for native applications is support for desktop/OS integration. Things like taskbar/panel icon control, notifications (not just toasts), access to the file system that doesn't use Javascript inside node.js, running tasks in the background independent of the GUI (after the GUI is closed, I expect the browser engine to end, freeing up all that RAM).

Striving to maintain feature parity with actual web-browsers eats up a lot of dev effort, so instead of targeting a sane subset of HTML, CSS (and optionally Javascript) it's simply easier to use an existing browser engine, which brings in the bloat and difficulty.

"Perfect is the enemy of good" has never been truer: I don't need everything that webkit, chrome, servo, etc provides when writing a native application, but "bloated" are the only options.[1]

Personally, I'm waiting for some free time, or a week off, to look into LibWeb (the SerenityOS engine, currently used by Ladybird browser). I think that creating a simple FFI around it is probably a better use of my time than doing the debug dance with Tauri and similar; at the end of the dance I'll still have a heavily bloated thing tied to an engine better suited for writing browsers than for writing apps.

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[1] Not sure where Sciter lands on this.

You are looking for https://azul.rs - which I wrote to finally fix this whole "Electron" situation: https://azul.rs/reftest

It's not ready yet (it does layout HTML semi-properly, but it still needs some polishing and the desktop integration is currently not working, only the layout), I hope can get a release of it out before Christmas.

How about HTML, CSS, and Rust? (cutting out the JS engine removes a lot of the bloat)

I'm building a web engine specifically targeting application development use cases here: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz. Binary sizes are in the 5-15mb range (depending on which features you enable).

Just use Qt. QML is not exactly like HTML, but in a lot of ways it's better. HTML is primarily a document format, QML gets closer to the semantics of an application, but in a declarative format. It's also much, much faster and simpler to deploy.

Or Flutter for that matter, which is actually also incredibly nice to work with.

I installed Zed to read JSON logs that caused my browser and Pycharm (Jetbrains, Java-based) to lag hard. Sometimes I scroll down to the millionth line since the quickness makes me think I downloaded only a subset.