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

blackboard.sh

126 points by merlindru 10 hours ago

I'm building a commercial macOS app with Electrobun [1]. 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 [2]. 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] Not affiliated - I just like the project.

[2]: 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 :)

xrd - an hour ago

The article mentioned notarizing and stapling as problems with prior frameworks. What's the story here? If you don't use xcode as your ide (and I don't see that this project management is happening inside xcode), Apple makes that stuff really hard. And windows is easier but still hard to automate in CI. If this framework offers better solutions I'm all ears.

maddada - 11 days 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.

lukevp - 7 hours ago

One of the main problems I see with tauri is that system web views just aren’t a great solution for a ui framework. Partly because Linux doesn’t have an official webview implementation, partly because the web views across OS versions have differences (eg. Tauri on Linux had a benchmark saying the boot time was 20+ seconds because of the webview, and win 7 and I think even early versions of win 10 do not use the edge webview).

This is a lot of tradeoffs for saving 100 megs.

I understand that we should be good stewards of our customers’ hardware and not waste things unnecessarily, but also have to balance that with shipping something and not worrying about all the edge cases. Most people in developed countries have Internet connections of 100+ mbps, which means the app will still download in <10 seconds.

Does electrobun support using an embedded chromium for the renderer? I went to the project readme and it was really unclear if that’s a currently-supported option and if so, how to use it.

hu3 - 9 hours ago

I see a lot of game devs in discord experimenting with Electrobun to release desktop games.

I think it's going to eat a piece of the Electron pie for Steam indie games.

Most stay with bun after seeing how fast and seamless it is to run typescript games with instant auto reload:

bun --watch game.ts

Alifatisk - 6 hours ago

Title should maybe specify that this is a blogpost from the author reflecting over the project. There’s better link to showcase the actual project https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs

chrisco255 - 3 hours ago

How big does a hello world binary compile to with this?

codethief - 4 hours ago

@OP I know it's "just" a webview at the end of the day but I still think the Electrobun website could use a screenshot or two. (Or maybe e.g. a short video of an app comparing the startup times of Electrobun, Tauri, Electron etc.)

zdragnar - 9 hours ago

Neat! Here's the project main page for those interested in more than the release announcement:

https://blackboard.sh/electrobun/docs/

It certainly looks clean enough, and I'm more familiar with zig than rust, so I might give it a shot.

rubymamis - 7 hours ago

I guess since Electron apps are 500MB+, 14MB is considered "tiny".

InfiniteLoopGuy - 4 hours ago

Can modern LLMs effectively be used on Electrobun codebases?

sumolessons - 7 hours ago

This looks promising. And it's exciting to think it could also target mobile [1].

[1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/21237

nine_k - 9 hours ago

/* Looked at the product for which Electrobun was built, co(lab). «Focus on building instead of managing tools. Keep your code, browser, terminal, notes, and git workflow in one unified interface.» Well, a great idea! This is what Emacs mostly gives me. */

skybrian - 9 hours ago

I'm wondering about security for this sort of thing. I guess it's like node.js in the sense that while you could load JavaScript code downloaded from the Internet at runtime, you probably shouldn't? Any additional gotchas due to the web view?

synergy20 - 8 hours ago

size? performance? bun last time I checked alone is 130MB

- 8 hours ago
[deleted]
queenkjuul - 9 hours ago

I'm going to production with a new Electron app at my job this week, i wish this had existed a year ago lol. Electron Builder does a pretty good job making the updates and signatures not TOO painful but it hasn't been painless by any stretch.

Looks cool, I'll try this for my next personal desktop project and see how it goes

phplovesong - 7 hours ago

Are there any numbers on comparison to electron?

Imustaskforhelp - 7 hours ago

If someone from Electrobun is reading this. Can Electrobun compile to android as well. I want to create a simple application which can take some index.html and pass an adblocker and create an app out of it since I think this idea is pretty cool.

I ended up having to use Ionic to create a html <-> Android app thing within github actions but Ionic doesn't support ad blocking abilities.

- 11 days ago
[deleted]
KingOfCoders - 6 hours ago

Moved from the molasses of VSCode to Rust-based Zed, no comparison. The second is snappy, responsive, uses much less memory (I can have 5 Zed open at the same time, no problems), not looking back.