Some "lightweight webviews": webview, WebWindow, Electrino

[laughinghan]

These are all "lightweight webviews" much like Neutralinojs and DeskGap (#43):

• like Electron and NW.js, your UI is written in HTML, CSS, and browser JS
• unlike NW.js (browser JS can call Node.js code which runs natively) and similar to Electron (native Node.js creates webview windows), these let various native languages create webview windows
• whereas Electron and NW.js build Chromium into your app, which is a resource hog, these use OS-builtin webviews

They are:

• webview
  repo: https://github.com/zserge/webview
  blogpost: https://zserge.com/posts/webview/
  Native language is Go by default. Bindings to other languages are available but most are unmaintained; C# appears to be maintained (handful of recent commits), and Rust appears to be active (significant recent activity), but not the others.
  Apparently the important code is just a 1.2kloc header file, that seems neat to me.
  Tauri (Add Tauri #61) says it's built on top of the Rust binding to this. All 3 seem to be active and have lots of contributors (of course, most of the code is still only by one person, in each).
• WebWindow
  repo: https://github.com/SteveSandersonMS/WebWindow
  blogpost: https://blog.stevensanderson.com/2019/11/18/2019-11-18-webwindow-a-cross-platform-webview-for-dotnet-core/
  C# is the only supported native language; I guess that means it ships with .NET Core packaged with it?
  There's a warning that it's only "super-pre-alpha quality", and it was only started in Nov and hasn't had activity since Feb, so it might just be a one-off experimental offshoot from Blazor.
• Electrino
  repo: https://github.com/pojala/electrino
  blogpost: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-with-electrino-c7ffdf1d6297
  Only supports macOS and Win10. Uses Node.js as its native language, like Electron.
  Unclear if defunct—recently accepted a PR for Win10 support, and a few other small commits, but otherwise no activity since 2017.

[TheJaredWilcurt]

webview is more of just a library that can be pulled in rather than something comparable to other items on this list that try to offer a lot more features. The closest stuff to it would be something like CEF which is justifiable for how popular it is.

WebWindow and Electrino are both unfinished. If that changes then they can be revisited. I'll add Electrino to the "unreviewed" list on the site, just because they had that annoying blog post that went viral. All marketing, no bite.