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Desktop frameworks

JavaScript frameworks for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies.

  • Tauri — Lightweight, secure desktop apps with a Rust backend and any frontend framework; produces small binaries without bundling a browser engine.
  • Electron — Desktop apps built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on top of Chromium and Node.js; powers VS Code, Slack, and Discord.
  • Perry — TypeScript-to-native compiler producing standalone executables (typically 2–5 MB) with no runtime dependencies; targets macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, Linux, Windows, watchOS, tvOS, WebAssembly, and Web with 25+ native UI widgets; built with Rust, SWC, and LLVM.
  • tinyjs — Pairs a txiki.js JavaScript backend with the system webview (WebKit, WebView2, WebKitGTK), so an app ships around 6 MB with no bundled Chromium, no Node, and no Rust toolchain; the backend you write is plain JavaScript with files, sockets, processes, FFI, and built-in SQLite, and it talks to the page over a Unix domain socket in a private temp directory rather than a local port. Hot reload in dev, build produces signed .app bundles, publish produces signed auto-updates that roll back on failure, and per-origin capability gating in tinyjs.json makes wrapping a third-party site shippable. MIT; macOS 15+ is stable, Windows and Linux are beta. Ships a SKILL.md so coding agents can work against its API.