alt.hn

5/13/2026 at 1:45:02 AM

Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI

 https://zero-native.dev

by gedy

5/13/2026 at 5:17:21 AM

> Use the system WebView for lightweight apps, or bundle Chromium via CEF

so basically a vibe coded Tauri in zig? I don't like calling webview dependent applications "native desktop apps".

Native desktop apps means using the OS primitives and directives to draw the UI imo; WinForms, SwiftUI, and their ilk.

by h4ch1

5/13/2026 at 5:33:56 AM

Maybe it's called zero native because that is how native it is.

by thayne

5/13/2026 at 7:16:41 AM

That was my interpretation too (no idea if it's correct though)...

by rob74

5/13/2026 at 6:09:13 AM

"Not native" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily (dot com is available for a few grand). Concept is solid, an ingenious name even.

by popcorncowboy

5/13/2026 at 5:15:34 AM

I love the redefinition of "native desktop app" - a web app which uses the system web-view instead of bundling Chrome.

by aiscoming

5/13/2026 at 6:42:29 AM

Considering Microsoft already doing this in win11, it's fine.

by feverzsj

5/13/2026 at 11:05:29 AM

They are redeveloping much of that electron-based code back to Win32 as part of their quality improvement initiative.

by HappySweeney

5/13/2026 at 10:08:12 AM

If Microsoft does it now, and didn't used to do it, it's probably terrible.

by lionkor

5/13/2026 at 4:34:02 AM

> No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No fighting the compiler for 20 minutes over a string.

I don’t like this attitude, both zig and rust have their strengths.

by AbuAssar

5/13/2026 at 5:36:26 AM

I would take Zig over Rust any time. It simply fits the way I think much much better.

And since 0.16/0.17 Zig introduced a very nice async/concurrency system that doesn't require function coloring. While async in Rust still feels strange and not well integrated.

by DeathArrow

5/13/2026 at 5:22:22 AM

Rust has bad ergonomics. You will see that "attitude" as long as coding exists, or lifetimes are fixed in a way to allow you to omit them in contexts which are not concurrent or are embarrassingly parallelizable.

by nurettin

5/13/2026 at 5:45:53 AM

> "I don't like this attitude"

Cool, let me know when you have a rational counterargument then, some of us have gotten fed up with Rust (especially at scale) and are very much enjoying Zig (which has no magic, which turns out to be a huge advantage at scale)

by pmarreck

5/13/2026 at 6:26:31 AM

"No borrow checker" id not a reason to switch to Zig, unless you have a reason that borrow checker is limiting you from developing, hence the "I don't like this attitude". Just give the reason, not the "solution"

Not to mention we're nitpicking over something that an LLM wrote.

by ramon156

5/13/2026 at 7:44:13 AM

There doesn't really need to be a counterargument. If you like Zig, that's great. Zig is great, you are great. You go on using it.

by InsideOutSanta

5/13/2026 at 5:55:37 AM

Ok have fun. The rest of us are having no problems.

by adastra22

5/13/2026 at 7:09:29 AM

Slightly off topic, but what is the best way to build a cross platform GUI app these days, but something with good graphics, typography, etc. I mean a beautiful app. I would prefer to have a shared core in Go, and then something around it to give me the GUI. I know on MacOS it is straightforward to build something beautifully looking with their native Swift toolkit, but not sure on Linux and Windows. Is it better to just use a web view, or perhaps Flutter?

by lifty

5/13/2026 at 7:40:00 AM

I keep coming back to this and not finding / choosing a solution. It sadly feels like people who are doing this are just going with Electron now. I'm mostly coding in Go now, so I seem to be looking for a similar solution to you.

This page has a lot of cross-platform GUI toolkits, but it focuses on C++:

https://philippegroarke.com/posts/2018/c++_ui_solutions/

I've been drawn to wxWidgets (actual native controls on each platform) or JUCE (most of the cross-platform commercial Windows/Mac/Linux audio effects I've bought are made in JUCE). But I've not had a chance to give either a proper try.

Years ago I used to all my cross-platform work with Xojo, a kind of cross-platform Visual Basic. That actually worked well for me, but then you're writing code in the Xojo Basic language, and it had some odd file formats for projects (not just raw text source files like C++ / Go would give me). Once LLMs hit I felt I probably needed to move on from Xojo to something less proprietary: https://www.xojo.com/

by SyneRyder

5/13/2026 at 9:08:06 AM

The last one I did was using Fyne in Go, which is quite cross platform but its software drawn not native. Its targeting phones as well so its cross compatibility is very good but at the cost of giving you the full complexity of desktop applications, it does not have a highly capable table view for example. Since its written in Go this is what you will develop in.

Otherwise I think its QT and GTK on C/C++ as the other option across the desktop operating systems, neither is native on anything but Linux but they also look OK but I think a lot of people would rather avoid C nowadays for application development.

by PaulKeeble

5/13/2026 at 7:38:34 AM

I'm actually working on that - it's called Hypen - (hypen.space).

You can build your core in Go or any other supported language, and write the UI in the Hypen DSL.

While desktop is still in the works and should be out in the next week or two, currently the alpha supports Native iOS, Android, Web and Web Canvas, and just like mobile, the Desktop will be _real_ native.

by hypendev

5/13/2026 at 8:16:38 AM

Thanks, I will keep an eye on this as well. Wish you success!

by lifty

5/13/2026 at 9:18:58 AM

[dead]

by lifty

5/13/2026 at 7:18:05 AM

I've not used it myself, but I've heard good things about Wails.

https://wails.io/

by kitd

5/13/2026 at 7:20:01 AM

I have my eyes on that, looking forward to V3, maybe they manage to ship mobile support as well. That would be fantastic. For anyone that doesn't know, it's still a browser based stack.

by lifty

5/13/2026 at 9:09:48 AM

Only reasonable way is shared core with thin UI layer on top. For Rust there is Crux, don’t know for other languages. Everything else is just compromise, like all Flutter apps I know on iOS are just atrocious.

by d12bb

5/13/2026 at 9:17:49 AM

I like this approach, it's what I had in mind, but Crux doesn't seem to support desktop targets. I know on MacOS you can get nice looking apps with their native toolkit, on Linux you have GTK4 which can be decent looking, but not amazing, and on Windows, I truly don't know. Native apps on Windows look crap to me (without even mentioning the advanced fragmentation in UI toolkits in Windows). Maybe someone has some good examples for Windows and Linux, using native SDKs.

by lifty

5/13/2026 at 10:03:56 AM

> No borrow checker. No lifetimes. No fighting the compiler for 20 minutes over a string.

It's embarrassing. If the borrow checker and lifetimes are difficult for the author, I would suggest sticking with non-systems-languages. In systems languages you have to either do the work the borrow-checker does in your head, or you let Rust do it.

If you are fighting the Rust compiler for 20 minutes over a string (or whatever actually happened that warrants this hyperbole), you are simply not writing good systems-level code.

This is an advanced version of the kind of person who deliberately compiles without warnings in C because they make it harder to find the error messages. It's complete amateur hour and it's embarrassing.

The real fix here is to learn how to do it properly. I VERY RARELY run into Rust compilation issues where I think "this is stupid". Nearly all of the time, the compiler is telling me that I forgot to think of something that I should have been thinking about, or that I've not been explicit enough. I've written C++ for way too long to know that this is hyper valuable.

I've also written enough Zig to know that Zig is not for people who are bad at systems level programming. It'll blow up in your face, just like C.

by lionkor

5/13/2026 at 5:24:33 AM

Given this is from Vercel and most likely vibe coded (hopefully not), I wonder how many zero-day vulnerabilities will be there... :^)

by norskeld

5/13/2026 at 7:07:08 AM

Then why make an app instead of a website?

by easeout

5/13/2026 at 6:24:16 AM

Using the "system WebView" is not a positive on Linux.

For some reason that always means WebKitGTK, which is crummy.

Someone, anyone, please get CEF working with GTK4.

by iamcalledrob

5/13/2026 at 5:05:33 AM

Im not sure if people are getting the biggest problem in electron desktop apps.

Its RAM usage not the disk!!

Why are they all making the same thing in different ways?! I have never worked on an electron app where the executable size was an impediment to the business. Its always the RAM/CPU usage. If we are going to work on the same webviews like electron and others, how will this make any difference?

by vijaybritto

5/13/2026 at 6:48:55 AM

Easy: the problem with memory is not the WebView nor is it displaying HTML using that WebView. The problem is the layers of layers of JavaScript (frameworks) running in that WebView when using Electron or the like.

I am working on something similar, HTMXNative as part of a bigger idea called interscri.pt that can use either WebView or native for rendering and the difference in memory consumption is somewhere between minimal (or even undetectable) and modest.

From a baseline that's also modest by current (native) standards.

by mpweiher

5/13/2026 at 9:08:36 AM

I am cursed that I always have to work on legacy products that were built many years ago and didnt consider these things.

I hope we eventually get a good/simple language/framework that can compile to native code. Even react native for mac/windows is good enough now.

by vijaybritto

5/13/2026 at 5:21:33 AM

Using the system webview theoretically saves memory. Though it's still not great.

by cosmotic

5/13/2026 at 5:20:36 AM

Cause they all share one webview. Electron apps each run their own version of chromium

by Bolwin

5/13/2026 at 6:56:40 AM

That is not native at all.

by jsomedon

5/13/2026 at 7:19:41 AM

Well, yes, it's zero-native (as in 0% native).

by rob74

5/13/2026 at 7:19:11 AM

hence the "zero" in the name /s

by anhner

5/13/2026 at 6:56:06 AM

This is not native.

by Oxodao

5/13/2026 at 5:33:42 AM

Still, using system's native GUI should be more performant and use less memory.

I would rather see existing Zig GUI libraries using system's GUI primitives improving. With LLM GUI stuff should be simple enough and we don't need to rely on people web expertise to build desktop apps.

by DeathArrow

5/13/2026 at 5:55:56 AM

Unfortunately, all the native "system" GUI frameworks are all terrible in their own unique ways.

Unless you mean drawing the gui directly to a graphics surface, which often results in even poor accessibility and system integration unless the developer cares a lot about that and puts a lot of effort into it.

by thayne

5/13/2026 at 6:54:41 AM

Qt is used to develop arguably the best desktop environment on the market - KDE Plasma - as well as a miriad of serious software artifacts. It's not exactly native to MacOS and Windows, but advantages overweight the downsides.

by kombine

5/13/2026 at 5:28:22 AM

No screenshot examples even? :/

by boxed

5/13/2026 at 6:36:59 AM

zero examples

by iamsaitam