tauri-workspace

quasar-proton [WIP]

A fresh take on creating cross-platform apps.

Proton brings a mode to build Quasar Apps that creates tiny, blazing fast binaries for all major desktop platforms. In Quasar's neverending quest for performance and security, the core team is proud to offer an alternative to Electron.

Whether you are just starting out making apps for your meetup or regularly crunch terabyte datasets, we are absolutely confident that you will love using Proton as much as we love making and maintaining it.

Who Proton is For

Anyone who can create a Quasar app can use Proton, as it is merely a new build target. All components and plugins (suitable for Native Desktop) can be used. For the User Interface, nothing has changed, except you will probably notice that everything seems much faster.

Because of the way Proton has been built and can be extended, developers are able to interface not only with the entire Rust ecosystem, but also with many other programming languages. Being freed of the heaviest thing in the universe and the many shortcomings of server-side Javascript suddenly opens up whole new avenues for high-performance, security-focused applications that need the purebred power, agility and community acceptance of a low-level language.

We expect to witness an entire new class of applications being built with Quasar Proton. From a simple calender to locally crunching massive realtime feeds at particle colliders or even mesh-network based distributed message- passing ecosystems - the bar has been raised and gauntlet thrown.

What will you make?

Technical Details

The user interface in Proton apps currently leverages Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and MSHTML (IE10/11) or Webkit via Edge on Windows. Proton is based on the MIT licensed prior work known as webview.

The default binding to the underlying webview library currently uses Rust, but other languages like Golang or Python (and many others) are possible (and only a PR away).

Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — and enable you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more. - https://www.rust-lang.org/

This combination of power, safety and usability are why we chose Rust to be the default binding for Proton. It is our intention to provide the most safe and performant native app experience (for devs and app consumers), out of the box.

Current Status

We are in the process of vetting this new mode. It is not yet available to use without jumping through some development hurdles. If you don't care, please reach out to the team at https://chat.quasar.dev and we'll guide you through the process. Here is a bit of a status report.

• Promise based File System Access
• App Icons and integration with Icon-Genie
• Frameless Mode
• Build on MacOS
• Build on Linux
• Build on Windows
• STDOUT Passthrough with Command Invocation
• Self Updater
• Inter Process Communication (IPC)
• Documentation

Comparison between Proton 1 and Electron 5

| | Proton | Electron | |--|--------|----------| | Binary Size MacOS | 3.6 MB | 148.7 MB | | Memory Consumption MacOS | 13 MB | 34.1 MB | | Benchmark FPS | TODO | TODO | | Interface Service Provider | Varies | Chromium | | Quasar UI | VueJS | VueJS | | Backend Binding | Rust | Node.js (ECMAScript) | | Underlying Engine | C++ | V8 (C/C++) | | FLOSS | Yes | No | | Multithreading | Yes | No | | Bytecode Delivery | Yes | No | | Can Render PDF | Yes | No | | Multiple Windows | Yes | Yes | | GPU Access | Yes | Yes | | Updater | Yes | Yes | | Inter Process Communication (IPC) | Yes | Yes | | Cross Platform | Yes | Yes | | Custom App Icon | Yes | Yes |

Relation to Upstream Origins

We have made the decision to fork, enhance and maintain several upstream projects here in this repository, in order to guarantee the security of the code and our ability to enhance it with features that may not be needed for other consumers.

We hope that this code is useful, but make no claims to suitability or guarantees that it will work outside of the Quasar ecosystem.

This has been done with our best attempt at due diligence and in respect of the original authors. Thankyou - this project would never have been possible without your amazing contribution to open-source and we are honoured to carry the torch further. Of special note:

• zserge for the original webview approach
• Boscop for the Rust Bindings

Documentation

Head over to the Quasar Framework official website: https://quasar.dev

Stay in Touch

For latest releases and announcements, follow on Twitter: @quasarframework

Chat Support

Get realtime help at the official community Discord server: https://chat.quasar.dev

Community Forum

Ask complicated questions at the official community forum: https://forum.quasar.dev

Contributing

Please make sure to read the Contributing Guide before making a pull request. If you have a Quasar-related project/component/tool, add it with a pull request to this curated list!

Thank you to all the people who already contributed to Proton!

Semver

quasarframework/proton is following Semantic Versioning 2.0.

Licenses

Code: (c) 2019 - Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, Razvan Stoenescu, Lucas Nogueira. MIT and where applicable Apache

Logo: CC-BY-NC-ND

• Original Proton Logo Design by Daniel Thompson-Yvetot
• Based on the prior work by Emanuele Bertoldi

Note: This license notice will not be complete until we have performed an upstream audit. If you feel that your name should be listed here, please create a PR to this file and provide references so we can fact-check. Thanks!