Wails: Golang's Bet On Desktop Grade Apps To Beat Electron
BBetter Stack
Computing/SoftwareInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00Wales is a cross-platform technology that lets you build desktop-grade apps in Go.
00:00:04This has been requested a ton of times on the channel after doing a bunch of desktop comparison
00:00:08videos. So today I'm going to take you through using Wales to build desktop-grade apps
00:00:13and compare it to using frameworks like Electron and Tori. We're going to go through the build of
00:00:17a desktop video recorder which we've done in other videos and compare things like file size,
00:00:22performance and developer experience. And Wales is actually completely new to me so we're going
00:00:27to be learning together on this one. So Wales works very much in the same way as Tori but the
00:00:36backend is in Go rather than Rust. You still build a front-end in a web view using web technologies
00:00:41then called native APIs which are managed by Golang. This means you can compile an application that's
00:00:47compatible with both Mac and Windows. But unlike Electron, Wales does not embed a browser. Instead
00:00:52it reuses the native rendering engine for each platform much like Tori does. So the bundle size
00:00:58technically should be a lot smaller but we're going to see that later on when we do the comparison.
00:01:03And if you enjoy content like this guys then subscribe for more. So this is the screen recording
00:01:07tool that I've developed with Wales and I've also done the same thing in Electron and Tori. We'll
00:01:12select the screen that we want to record. Press record. You can move the mouse around. The actual
00:01:16desktop app won't appear in the record itself. I'll press stop. Then you can see the screen I've just
00:01:21recorded. I could cut this up if I wanted to and then just click export to MP4 to just save the video
00:01:27directly to my machine. So if we look inside the build for this you'll see that it's a very similar
00:01:32setup to what you would expect on Electron. We have all the front-end files in a front-end folder
00:01:36and then we have the entry file. And in this case it's a Go file called main.go and inside here
00:01:41we've got a main function. Again you would expect to see a similar thing inside Electron and we can do
00:01:47things like declare the title, the width and height, set things like the background color and then set
00:01:52things for Mac specifically. So if you do want differences between Mac and Windows that's completely
00:01:57possible. Now if we look inside the front-end here inside source you would actually see all of the
00:02:02React code. So if we look inside app.tsx this is just standard React code except from we're calling
00:02:09APIs that are defined on the Go side. So if we look at this import here API and see its usages across the
00:02:16file you can see we're doing API.onrecording finished, onrecording failed, start recording and that API is
00:02:22automatically generated by Wales. So if we look inside the API itself you can see that all of the core
00:02:27functions are coming from this file here wales.js slash go slash main slash app. Now if we look inside
00:02:33here you can see that this file is automatically generated and we've got Welsh at the top and English
00:02:39and that's because believe it or not the creator of Wales is Welsh. So we've got all these functions
00:02:43here like export video, list sources, request screen access, all the things that you would need for a
00:02:49screen recording tool. So then if we jump over to the Go side here in app.go and then we comment out
00:02:54list sources and then save that file you'll see that suddenly we get an error inside API.ts because now
00:02:59list sources does not exist and this is because we're running wales.dev. So anytime a change happens
00:03:05inside the Go file it automatically re-renders the TypeScript definitions. So if we go back now and then
00:03:11comment this back in you'll see that now the error disappears and then the desktop app actually reloads
00:03:16because all of the changes from the Go side so from the back end automatically recompile and re-render
00:03:23the application. Now let's do some comparisons to see the difference between these three frameworks.
00:03:27First we'll look at bundle size. Wales comes in at 52 megabytes, Torii at 57 megabytes and Electron
00:03:34at no surprise 324 megabytes. Wales and Torii are noticeably smaller here and that's because they do
00:03:41not bundle Chromium so that's pretty much expected. However I would say by using each platform's native
00:03:47web view which is what Wales and Torii do you are more likely to see some platform differences.
00:03:51That is much less of an issue these days but just something to keep in mind. So basically Torii and
00:03:57Wales are going to produce similar artifacts in terms of bundle size because both frameworks are
00:04:02architected in pretty much the same way despite using vastly different technologies under the hood.
00:04:07Now let's take a look at startup time and as with previous videos I've done on desktop apps we're
00:04:12going to launch each of these apps 10 times and then just take the average. Wales comes in at 395
00:04:18milliseconds, Torii at 410 milliseconds and Electron at 350 milliseconds. Now with cold starts where we
00:04:26purge the cash each time Wales gets 2,337, Torii 2,049 and Electron comes in a little bit faster
00:04:34actually at 1,890. Now looking at performance and as with Torii the runtime performance when recording
00:04:40the screen is much better than Electron and that's actually because of our setup where we use the
00:04:45native capture kit from Mac so no data is traveling over the bridge whereas with Electron we record from
00:04:51the web view itself and then pass data to the back end which does come with a little bit of overhead.
00:04:56Technically you could use the native capture kit if you was to write some custom c code with Electron
00:05:02but this is like the default way of doing things with Electron so that's what we're comparing it to
00:05:06today. Now let's take a look at developer experience and this is really where we're going to see the
00:05:11biggest difference. I actually really enjoyed building with Wales however I would say the part of the
00:05:15screen capture was not as easy as with Torii. I had to write objective c code to access capture kit
00:05:21whereas with Torii you could stay completely in Rust and this is because Rust has a big ecosystem of
00:05:28community crates wrapping Apple's native frameworks. So in Torii I just pulled in a crate called screen
00:05:33capture kit and the whole recording API is normal Rust. Go has nothing decent for screen capture kit that I
00:05:39could find but it does have something called C Go which is Go's built-in way for compiling C code.
00:05:44This means with Go you can just write native C in a .m file, expose it as plain C functions and then
00:05:50tell Go which of Apple's frameworks to link against. So this means you end up writing real objective C
00:05:56and calling the same Apple APIs as the Rust crate but this time you own all of the code. That actually
00:06:02ended up being about 450 lines of objective C code which the Rust app just didn't have. So overall I am
00:06:08leaning slightly more towards Torii. The ecosystem around Rust crates is better from what I found
00:06:14but really it does come down to preference. If you like developing it in Go then Wales is a really
00:06:18decent option and if you like Rust then just choose Torii. However if you do pick Wales you may have to
00:06:24write some native code just because the ecosystem isn't as established. Well hopefully you enjoyed this
00:06:29one guys and you can subscribe for more content like this and if you want to see more comparison videos
00:06:33of desktop frameworks like where we compared Dino desktop to Electrobun. I've linked a video right
00:06:39here that you can watch. Otherwise thanks so much for watching. I've been Warren from Betterstack
00:06:43and I'll see you in the next one. And unfortunately guys Milo said no more videos for the week so
00:06:49I'll see you on Monday.
00:06:50*music plays*