I have a working (and not vibe coded) implementation of a "browser engine for apps": <a href="https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
So far it's only HTML/CSS (and we have our Rust-based framework to write the apps in). But it has been designed for fast incremental rendering, so it could be extended with JavaScript support quite easily.
that looks very interesting. if it's targeting the electron/sciter market I would encourage you to put the binary size and memory footprint in the readme so people can see where it lies on that spectrum - it's one of my top priorities when evaluating a desktop app library.
- Binary sizes start around 8mb if you're using GPU rendering (you can go smaller with CPU rendering, but you probably want the GPU). Our full browser app which pulls in things like sqlite, http cache libraries, etc is 20mb. Those usually compress to about half for distribution (.dmg, .appimage, etc).
- Base memory usage is something like 100mb (mostly from the graphics stack). I'm hoping to be able to bring that down a bit, but I think you can't realistically get much lower than 60mb with modern graphics. And to be perfectly honest we currently have an issue for RAM where it will often jump to more like 300-400mb after a little use. And I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of that yet.
Something like a 4k RGBA texture being 30mb and you need at least 2 for a swapchain. Of course you might not be rendering at 4k, but those are just output buffers before you even start counting application memory.
mircerlancerous · · focus · HN ↗
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗
So far it's only HTML/CSS (and we have our Rust-based framework to write the apps in). But it has been designed for fast incremental rendering, so it could be extended with JavaScript support quite easily.
zem · · focus · HN ↗
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗
FWIW:
- Binary sizes start around 8mb if you're using GPU rendering (you can go smaller with CPU rendering, but you probably want the GPU). Our full browser app which pulls in things like sqlite, http cache libraries, etc is 20mb. Those usually compress to about half for distribution (.dmg, .appimage, etc).
- Base memory usage is something like 100mb (mostly from the graphics stack). I'm hoping to be able to bring that down a bit, but I think you can't realistically get much lower than 60mb with modern graphics. And to be perfectly honest we currently have an issue for RAM where it will often jump to more like 300-400mb after a little use. And I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of that yet.
zem · · focus · HN ↗
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗