We built a background daemon as a macOS menu bar app in Go, and the performance was surprisingly bad. The Go bindings for native UI frameworks ended up being massive RAM hogs. When we profiled it, we found that the GC essentially gave up under load, which explained why customers were reporting a simple menu bar app consuming 2.5GB+ of RAM on their Macs. We eventually abandoned the Go approach and switched to Electron. (Not-so) Surprisingly, both the DX and UX improved significantly for our use case. Personally, I’d still prefer Swift/C#/C++ for native desktop work (coming from a Qt C++ background), but given the business constraints at the time, Electron ended up being the most pragmatic choice.
> When we profiled it, we found that the GC essentially gave up under load
Hmm, the Go GC is really quite capable, so I wonder what kind of pathological load it was being presented with. Even then, when the GC "fails" it means elevated CPU load from collection.
The main thing I can think of would be the application "leaking" by having unintentional references (or worse, actually leaking through cgo bindings), or trashing the allocator to cause temporary spikes in between cleanups.
However, while I don't think Go was actually to blame here, I would never use native UI bindings to a language that isn't 1:1 compatible with the original design and memory management principles, as such bindings get disproportionaly large and complex. It just sets you up for a bad time.
I totally agree :) I don't blame Go either. We were already a pure Go shop with a lot of focus on backend and infra systems engineering and were trying to venture into the desktop app market for our device monitoring software. Once we validated our idea with a rather buggy MVP haha, we quickly switched over to Electron and deployed on all 3 desktop OSes properly.
I remember we used https://github.com/getlantern/systray at some point along with some interaction with fyne.io. That said, I do not remember how we managed the lifetime but we did test it thoroughly before deploying to our initial beta users (or so we thought :P). The GC behavior started to happen whenever the app was in the background, which it was supposed to be for the majority of the time.
I actually did something similar: business logic and most things written in Go, but the menu bar or tray icon done in native APIs like Win32 and Gtk. It was surprisingly very good experience overall. I have tried so many ways around it before settling for that.
That is a surprising use case about Go and Electron (!), I would have imagined no contest for the superior performance of a compiled language, even with garbage collection. But the mention of "bindings for native UI frameworks", it was probably running the compiled code in a very tight loop, stressing the runtime. In contrast, Chromium specializes in UI with years of optimization.
Recently for a specific purpose I was reviewing options including Tauri, various WebView bindings, and in the end had to admit that Electron is probably the best approach in terms of feature set, development speed, etc.
Been a while since I worked on it but I remember we used https://github.com/getlantern/systray at some point along with some interaction with fyne.io AFAIR.
I really enjoyed building small apps with wails.
Even though people would prefer that we all used native UI frameworks, the DX is simply incomparable to that of web technologies.
And for most apps using browser based rendering won't be an issue. People often underestimate how optimized mondern browsers really are. And because Chromium is not shipped the bundle size is managable.
Not wanting to use JS on the backend I tried both Tauri and Wails and found the simplicity of Go to just work perfectly for my use-cases
Electron is quite bad on memory usage because it carries its own v8 environment on top of its own browser platform on top of using _another_ v8 environment for the nodejs part.
Tauri and Wails just use the one available in the OS (UIWebKit in macos, WebView2 in windows), it is also why they load so fast, you probably already have the heavy part loaded in memory. And, of course, brings a tiny statically linked binary instead of running on top of a massive runtime.
We recently did evaluation of different ways of building a cross-plarform desktop app as a Go team. We have built a PoC with Wails and Fyne, and we love Fyne. After a week from making a decision to go with Fyne, we are now 90% done and already running first alpha tests with users (who also love the simplicity of it). Devs like the ease of development and a ton of dependencies we don’t need to worry about, since Fyne is a lot leaner than Wails.
Oh the reference to Rails made me ponder how long have we come after the initial Joyent Slingshot vision for desktop apps based on, yes you guessed, Ruby on Rails.
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Hmm, the Go GC is really quite capable, so I wonder what kind of pathological load it was being presented with. Even then, when the GC "fails" it means elevated CPU load from collection.
The main thing I can think of would be the application "leaking" by having unintentional references (or worse, actually leaking through cgo bindings), or trashing the allocator to cause temporary spikes in between cleanups.
However, while I don't think Go was actually to blame here, I would never use native UI bindings to a language that isn't 1:1 compatible with the original design and memory management principles, as such bindings get disproportionaly large and complex. It just sets you up for a bad time.
This sounds to me like leaking resources from the binding. Which binding did you use and how did you manage it's lifetime?
Recently for a specific purpose I was reviewing options including Tauri, various WebView bindings, and in the end had to admit that Electron is probably the best approach in terms of feature set, development speed, etc.
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Which bindings did you use ?
And for most apps using browser based rendering won't be an issue. People often underestimate how optimized mondern browsers really are. And because Chromium is not shipped the bundle size is managable.
Not wanting to use JS on the backend I tried both Tauri and Wails and found the simplicity of Go to just work perfectly for my use-cases
Tauri and Wails just use the one available in the OS (UIWebKit in macos, WebView2 in windows), it is also why they load so fast, you probably already have the heavy part loaded in memory. And, of course, brings a tiny statically linked binary instead of running on top of a massive runtime.
0 - https://fyne.io
Other discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785556 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478079 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22291150
Just my 2 cents ;)
With Electron, for example, a stripped down Chromium is shipped. So what does the web view rendering with this package?
Why is that hidden behind a click and two walls of text?