Electrobun v1: Build fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop apps with TypeScript

Source: Hacker News

Electrobun v1: Build fast, tiny, and cross‑platform desktop apps with TypeScript

I’m building a commercial macOS app with Electrobun¹. I previously wrote the same app with Tauri. While I love Tauri, using Electrobun has been an absolute breeze; I got the same app done in roughly 70 % of the time². It’s a very productive stack, largely due to Electrobun and the DX niceties of Bun, including its built‑in bundler.

Electrobun lets you open, manipulate, and close webview windows and communicate with them using typed RPC. It also handles building, code signing, and notarization. Because I’m using Bun, running an HMR + React + Tailwind server is just one command:

bun ./index.html

or like five lines of code. Passing --console streams the webview’s console.log() output to your terminal.

There are many other features I haven’t explored yet, such as platform‑native notifications, prompts, and pop‑ups. The updating mechanism is impressive: it relies on a bsdiff implementation written in Zig, so you ship only delta files, making updates to large apps just a few kilobytes most of the time.

It’s genuinely a very productive stack and an impressive piece of technology.

Footnotes

1. Not affiliated – I just like the project. ↩

2. The API and implementation were clear, so I’ll cautiously say this is not a case of “rewrites are always faster”. In fact, the Tauri version was a rewrite too. ↩