Show HN: Raincast – Describe an app, get a desktop app (open source)(github.com)
11 pointsby tito7779 hours ago7 comments
  • ghrl8 hours ago
    Well, while Tauri is certainly nice, it's not quite what I imagine when I hear "native".
    • tito7778 hours ago
      But you're right that the UI layer is still HTML/CSS rendered in a webview. It's not SwiftUI or Win32. Tauri gets you closer to native than Electron, smaller binaries, lower memory, OS-level webview, but it's not the same as writing Cocoa or GTK directly.

      For what this project does (AI generating full apps), Tauri hits a good tradeoff: one codebase, all platforms, real system access, and the AI is much better at generating React than platform-specific UI frameworks. I tried to do the same with Swift it, fails meserably

    • frizlab8 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • ramon1568 hours ago
        What does this have to do with Tauri? Besides, that's apples to oranges. Zed has a lot more features, if you don't want that then Sublime is a better pick.
        • guessmyname8 hours ago
          > frizlab: […] while Zed is nice, Sublime is better.

          > ramon156: What does this have to do with Tauri?

          Not @OP but I imagine they are thinking: “because Zed is built on top of Tauri and Sublime Text is not.” Sublime Text’s user interface is built on top of a mix of (native) UI renderers for each major OS [1], mostly based on Google’s 2D graphics library: Skia https://skia.org/ . Recent versions (v3) go even lower: Vulkan and OpenGL https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/hardware-accelerat...

          EDIT: I stand corrected, Zed does not use Tauri (anymore?) but instead gpui ( https://www.gpui.rs ) as seen in their Cargo.toml file → https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...

          • h4ch18 hours ago
            Doesn't zed use gpui?
          • amonith8 hours ago
            Wait, what, Zed is Tauri? How? One of their main things was that they implemented the UI layer completely from scratch using their own GPU-accelerated rendering engine. It's got none of that browser-type stuff.
  • afternoon128 hours ago
    How is this better than..Already existed platforms (both legacy and Indie)...like Antigravity etc..
    • tito7778 hours ago
      I also use Antigravity. I want to have the live preview of what I'm building. I don't have it in Claude Code, Antigravity, or Cursor.
  • Oxodao8 hours ago
    Not native at all
    • tito7777 hours ago
      Edited now. My main concern is how to embed a mini Rust compiler in Tauri for prod time.
  • Barbing8 hours ago
    That live preview sounds pretty neat!
    • tito7778 hours ago
      Thanks, I failed after three attempts. I tried to build a clone of the current backend Tauri at dev time. The only approach that worked well was having a proxy. But now I'm looking into embedding a compiler inside the Tauri Rust at prod time.
  • Remi_Etien8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • heyethan8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • pasanhk8 hours ago
    This looks like a massive level-up for the "AI-to-Software" pipeline. Moving from simple web-app generation to actual native desktop apps is a huge step for utility—especially if it handles the boilerplate for system-level APIs.

    The fact that it's open-source is a great move for the HN crowd. I’m curious, what are you using under the hood for the desktop shell? Is it wrapping an Electron/Tauri instance, or is it generating something like Rust/Python natively?

    Clean UI on the site, too. Excited to see where this goes!

    • tito7778 hours ago
      Under the hood, it is wrapping Tauri, and as the live preview benefits from a proxy-tauri backend to let you feel like you are already in prod mode. I like that feeling too. There is no Python, only Rust, AppleScript, and Shell script.
      • pasanhk7 hours ago
        Using Tauri makes a lot of sense here keeping the binary size small while having Rust's safety for the backend is a huge win over Electron. The proxy tauri backend for live previews sounds like a clever way to handle the dev-to-prod feedback loop. Curious if you have hit any specific hurdles with AppleScript for the system level automation yet?
        • tito7777 hours ago
          AppleScript execution is running outside of the tauri app; the current app has no way to get the output reliably of the AS code generated by AI. Unless I do a semantic review of the code to make sure that I can capture the output/error of AS execution. By now, AS run 90% of the time, when it is a single-phase execution, then it is easy. But multiphase execution has a high chance of having the code break in the middle.

          That is why I instruct the AI engine to prefer sequential execution (atomic fashion)