Deno Desktop

solarkraft

This is a smart thing to ship. For me it would totally be a consideration when deciding on a platform to use.

jorisw

> Web technology is the most widely-known UI toolkit in the world. Poor choice of words there IMHO. The reason Electron apps get a lot of flak is because they are everything _but_ a UI toolkit. They consistently miss the mark in adopting UI patterns from their host OS. Web tech is just web tech. Yes it will allow you to render a button, but even unstyled, the button won't necessarily look native to the OS, and will vary between browsers.

sheept

I was wondering how this integrates with Deno's permission system, which is one of its biggest strengths especially for letting agents run amok on your device. The CLI reference page[0] notes, > The permissions you grant at compile time are baked into the compiled binary: I think it would be nice if this could be surfaced to the user somehow, like letting the user know and decide which permissions they want to give access to. [0]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/desktop/#runtime...

lillesvin

As much as I like cross-platform stuff, I also really like native UIs that follow native UX patterns, etc.

utopiah

Interesting but IMHO as we see on mobile providing WebViews work. Maybe instead of having Electron, Tauri, Electrobun, now Deno desktop but also plenty of alternatives then desktop browsers should provide WebViews on desktop with sandbox and permissions that make those applications usable. The alternatives listed here would just be fallback for a transition period until the WebViews are "good enough".

jaimehrubiks

This web page stole my scroll liberty

droidjj

> The default WebView backend uses the operating system's own webview for small binaries, and you still have the entire npm ecosystem available through Deno's Node compat layer. Sounds like a similar architecture to Tauri, but your business logic is in typescript instead of rust.

sureglymop

Looks actually good! I wonder if it supports opening invisible browser windows and doing things like intercepting cookies. In my desktop application I leverage a hidden browser window to manage auth state and use it like a proxy for the rest of the application. Might try to port it to deno desktop.

porridgeraisin

While I've never liked to use deno compared to node and bun, this looks particularly good. The zero config options are nice, all the features seem to be in the place I like, and I'm happy they're not dogmatic about using the system webview and let you ship your own CEF. The state of system webviews on non-windows platforms is horrendous.

bel8

I'm happy for competition in this space, specially because Deno can run true TypeScript directly and not just strip types like the current Node implementation. With that said, this is going to eat a lot of Tauri market. Why would I use Tauri now? The 150mb of additional bundle size is just an extra 1 to 10 seconds of download time in most internet connections and you get a reliable rendering engine.

m00dy

would be cool to have a comparison with tauri.

DiabloD3

I don't get the point of this. The world is trying to make computers faster and more accessible, more web UI slop isn't going to help that. Dumping Javascript entirely is the first step on that road.

bossyTeacher

How is this better than Electron?

wg0

I hope bun desktop is coming soon?

arikrahman

I've decided on using a Clojure/Flutter hybrid that gets the best of all worlds. May integrate move from Bun to using Deno here https://codeberg.org/arik/clutter

DaanDL

I swear we're just going to end up with Java again.

daft_pink

Is it going to support iOS/Android?

krawcu

Why did they describe electrobun as macOS only? I checked their docs and it has support for Windows, macOS and Linux https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/comparison/ https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun#platform-support

numlock86

How does this differ from electrobun, which they explicitly mention, but make no point about? I had a quick drive with deno desktop and don't see how it's better. If anything it's lacking in comparison in my opinion. But hey, we can build desktop apps with deno now, too. So they got that going I guess ...

leleat

> Shared CEF runtime across apps. Every app currently bundles its own CEF copy. A managed shared runtime would drop binary sizes to a few MB per app. On the roadmap. This[0] sounds interesting. I am not familiar with CEF, so I wonder how the versioning works. When different apps require different versions of CEF, do we just essentially end up with the electron model where every app bundles their own browser (just slightly less bad). Or is there still an advantage to a "shared runtime" in that case? [0]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/comparison/