Consider moving away from Electron for a lighter native desktop experience

[chandranilbakshi]

Hi! I wanted to suggest considering alternatives to Electron for the desktop version of t3code.

Electron is obviously a convenient choice for maintaining a single cross-platform application, but it also comes with a fairly significant runtime overhead since every installation effectively ships Chromium + Node.js along with the application.

For an editor/tool like t3code, I think it could be worth exploring a lighter desktop framework in the future. Some potential benefits would be:

• Lower memory usage

• Smaller application/binary size

• Faster startup time

• Lower idle resource usage

• Better integration with native OS functionality

Something like Tauri could potentially preserve most of the existing web-based frontend while replacing the Electron runtime with the system WebView and a much smaller native backend. Other approaches such as Wails or a fully native implementation could also be considered depending on the project's direction.

I understand that migrating away from Electron would be a significant architectural change and that Electron provides mature tooling and very consistent behavior across Windows, macOS, and Linux. So I'm not necessarily suggesting an immediate rewrite, but I'd be interested in whether reducing the dependency on Electron is something the maintainers have considered for the long term.

It would also be interesting to benchmark the current Electron build against an experimental Tauri build in terms of memory usage, startup time, and binary size before deciding whether the migration would actually be worthwhile.

Curious to hear what the maintainers and community think.

[juliusmarminge]

Closing as a duplicate of #355 (Explore electrobun as a possible future desktop runtime).

That thread already covered Electron alternatives for a lighter footprint (including Tauri / system WebView), and maintainers closed it after noting Electron is preferred for V8 and cross-platform consistency for now.