Flutter is written in Dart but renders to a canvas on the web making it a very, very poor choice for web apps. Especially backend/fullstack apps. Plus you can't use tailwind or whatever flavor of css library there is today. Flutter just nailed the "get up and running" part which we've got as well: `cargo binstall dioxus-cli`, `dx new`, `dx bundle` is literally less than 30 seconds. Hopefully `dx deploy` coming soon.
Electron is... it's electron. A whole chromium instance, an IPC bridge between your frontend and the system, NodeJS, etc. If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb. You can easily deploy them on an embedded/low end device. We're hoping to eat some market share in the embedded-ish land (not true embedded, but like industrial or POS).
Dioxus also has mobile and desktop compatible server functions which basically no other projects have. Expo has been kinda exploring this space. One of our examples is deploying your own LLM on your own infrastructure with a dioxus mobile app UI and it fits in a single file and builds in under a minute.
Thanks, wasn't aware of Expo, though it seems to only do mobile+web apps but not desktop apps?
> If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb.
I'm aware of this from familiarity with Tauri, but hearing it again still amazes me. Very cool.
I have an app in mind I want to build, and really would like to have standalone versions on Android+iOS+Linux+Mac+Windows, plus a web app. But there's no way I can manage all that as a single developer. And the fact no development tool has really nailed this yet is telling how hard it is. Whoever really gets this right will save a ton of developer hours across the industry, and that's valuable. Good luck, hope you guys pull it off!
PS - one feature request: a local/offline-first mode that eases development of apps that work even with poor or no internet connection. Basically I want to build something like Obsidian that is multi-platform, and does all processing and data storage locally first, in an accessible format like SQLLite or flat files, then syncs with the cloud when available, all with as few developer resources as possible. A tool that enables that would be amazing.
What is Dioxus's competitive proposition vs those two? The performance and memory efficiency+safety of Rust is one, any others?