1043: I’m Using GPUI For Everything

Scott Tolinski (0:00)

Goodbye, Electron, goodbye, Tauri, goodbye, desktop apps using WebViews. I'm a web guy, I love the web, but I'm building desktop apps with Rust, and I'm not looking back. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about GPUI, what the heck it is, how it can be the desktop application development workflow of your dreams, and a little bit about how similar it is to React. We're gonna be looking at some code, we're gonna be talking about some libraries, I'm gonna be showing some stuff I built. If you have not heard of GPUI or this sounds interesting to you, this is the episode for you. We're gonna be going deep on GPUI. It is sick. My name is Scott Tolinski, I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes?

Wes Bos (0:42)

Very curious to hear what you have to say about this because I know that you were Mr. Tauri for a while, and I know you dip into quite a few different things. This is from the folks at Zed, we should say that. I'll let Scott explain it, he knows a lot better. But very curious to see, is this something Scott is actually going to like, or is this just something Scott's really excited about, and then he's going to, because you were really excited about Tauri for a while, and then you're like, you know what?

Maybe it isn't, isn't it?

Scott Tolinski (1:12)

Let people be excited about stuff, Wes. I'm excited about things.

Wes Bos (1:15)

I'm glad you are because that's how we get good things, right? Like you dive in, you figure out what the edges are, and then the world is a better place. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Scott Tolinski (1:25)

So, Electron uses a WebView, Electron uses like a Chrome instance, and then it does everything in TypeScript or Node to run your actual server side of things.

Wes Bos (1:39)

Yeah, your back end of your app.

Scott Tolinski (1:40)

Your back end, yeah. And the sell for Tauri was that, oh, it's rust on the back end, right? But the benefits come from the fact that it's using your native WebView. And now Tauri, you can use any WebView you want now. It can use Chrome if you want to too. But the native WebView part seemed like a major sell because you're not having to ship a browser WebView with each app. One of the things that Electron gets chunky with is that the apps are shipping an instance of Chromium with the app. And then also Chromium can get really costly, man, when you're not working in it well. Now, we've seen some apps like VS Code use Electron very well. In fact, if VS Code is slow, it's usually a third-party extension, not VS Code itself. So Electron can work and can be very fast. But in my process here, I found that the native WebView side of things is not it, especially on Mac OS with Safari.

The feature set sucks for desktop apps on WebKit Safari or WK WebKit. I think that's it.

WebKit WebView, WebKit WebView, whatever it is. Either way.

Wes Bos (3:00)

WK WebView, you're right.

Scott Tolinski (3:02)

Yes.

Wes Bos (3:02)

I just looked it up.

Scott Tolinski (3:03)

WK WebView, not feature rich and not good for desktop applications and very unpredictable in terms of who has what features because you're not shipping a specific version, right? With Electron, you can ship a version of your choice of Chrome that you know the features will be there for every user who downloads it.

Wes Bos (3:22)

What most people do with these Electron apps is they flip on some things that are either experimental or they'll modify Chromium in some way so that there is support for what they want, right? Because there are inherent limitations of the web browser. So if you can sort of turn some of those things on, like one example, HTML and Canvas, huge, huge one. Like for, what is it? Remotion is the JavaScript video editor, right? They can render it out for you.

They couldn't do that if they were using the native WebView because that would be Safari in that case. Yes. You have to turn on HTML and Canvas.

Scott Tolinski (4:06)

Yeah, yeah, totally. So enter GPUI, the Zed team when we, and actually I will say Wes, this is a pure coincidence. I'm wearing my Zed hoodie today. I did not do this on purpose. I'm very like, this makes me look like I'm sponsored here. Folks, this is not sponsored. They've paid me no money. They did give me this sweatshirt, but only because we had talked about Zed in an episode and they liked that. So we don't, we don't take spot. I've been seeing that more and more, Wes. Anytime we publish a video, people are like, you got paid to talk about StyleX, which is an open source CSS library from Meta. Who cares?