Building High-Performance Desktop Apps with Tauri and Rust

Electron has dominated the desktop application market for years. But the tide is shifting towards a lighter, inherently more secure, and blazingly fast alternative: Tauri.

Powered by Rust on the backend and essentially any web framework (from React and Vue, to primitive HTML) on the frontend, Tauri changes how we build desktop systems.

Why Tauri?

Unlike Electron, Tauri doesn’t bundle a full Chromium instance with every application. Rather, it utilizes the system’s native OS webview (WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows, and WebKitGTK on Linux).

Key Benefits:

Size: Instead of hundreds of megabytes, a compiled Tauri app is only a few megabytes.
Speed: Rust handles all heavy system logic via a robust IPC bridge.
Security: Multi-process architecture limits security vulnerabilities.

Building The Rust Backend Bridge

To connect a JavaScript invoke call in the frontend, you’ll write simple rust functions marked with the Tauri command macro.

CODE

#[tauri::command]
fn get_system_metrics() -> String {
    // Collect system metrics rapidly
    format!("CPU: 12%, RAM: 8GB")
}

fn main() {
    tauri::Builder::default()
        .invoke_handler(tauri::generate_handler![get_system_metrics])
        .run(tauri::generate_context!())
        .expect("error while running tauri application");
}