Comment by KronisLV
1 month ago
> it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world.
I think that projects that ship packaged web apps but attempt to use the system native web views where available are really nice, like Wails: https://wails.io/ (so for example, on Windows it would use Webview2, so you don't have to package an entire Chromium install yourself)
Here's a comparison of how the distribution sizes change, Wails in particular also has way faster builds than something like Tauri: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...
That said, I wish we got more native software, or even something like LCL that can target Win32, GTK, Qt or whatever else is available. Sure, writing components that are available on a lot of platforms and work similarly everywhere is a pain for the developers, but I applaud the effort regardless, since the above solutions like Wails don't actually do anything for the memory usage and CPU cycles, whereas native GUI software is better for most apps that don't try to be very interactive.
I could even see myself using Lazarus/Pascal more if it seemed to have a more active ecosystem, right now I couldn't tell you what are the equivalents of something like Spring Boot for webapps, or even consuming Web APIs in client software, handling OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, seems like mORMot 2 would fit the bill the closest?
As I understand, the main problem with native web views is that you now have to deal with all the inconsistencies of e.g. Blink vs WebKit. Also, browsers tend to be more aggressively updated, which translates to potential app breakage due to bugs or deprecated features.
With respect to Lazarus, I agree that the ecosystem around it is not exactly great. It would be interesting to see LCL ported to something more modern that is reasonably simple, cross-platform and has good tooling. E.g. Go, much as I dislike it as a language, would probably be a great fit for something like that. And Pascal being fairly conservative and easy enough to parse, I suspect you could even automate this translation for the most part.
One thing I've always kind of wished for was a way to write the WEB dialect of Pascal in Lazarus --- then one could use Web2C --- if one could just link in platform-specific GUI libraries....