That's a very cool project (I've used OCaml before) and I hope it takes off. I should try it, but I admit I'm a little skeptical because there are so many details to get right like focus management, accessibility, and more.

Unfortunately since I can't rewrite my project entirely, I'm going to need something that reduces bloat by using a local webview instead, so it's still web-based.

The local web view is the bloat. The rest of electron is not the problem.

? A local webview usually means that it reuses the user's already installed browser and uses that instead.

The browser I have installed is the single most resource intensive program I have on my computer.

Why? Because you picked a particularly bad one or because you have 200 open tabs? Usually the browser is running anyways so adding another open tab or window increases resource usage much less than another program shipping its own browser engine.

Do you know of a browser that isn't massively resource intensive?

I agree, shipping a separate browser engine is also a mistake.

Without a breakdown of what you're doing in that browser, what you have customized in terms of config and extensions, etc. there is literally no information for others in a statement like that; this is an anecdote.

It's not even clear if you're being disparaging or whether you intended to follow this up with "and that's why I'm glad people reuse that stack instead of adding yet more bloat to my already struggling machine in the form of a home-rolled sub-par UI rendering stacks".

Sorry, I'm uncertain what you're trying to say -- do you actually think that the only two choices are browsers and home rolled rendering, or are you deliberately constructing a straw man?

You mean like what you just did, turning the comment about your statement having no information into a comment about a binary choice?

No.

I am saying that your original statement is of no use because it has no information: it is an anecdote about "some browser" running on "some machine" being in "in some way", none of quantified or even further described, and so your claim can't be used to draw any conclusions about really anything at all.

What did you even intend to imply? Did you say it because you wanted to thumbs-up the idea of reusing already installed browsers (because it can certainly be read that way) or did you want to thumbs-down the idea of using the already installed browser? (because it can certainly ALSO be read that way).

Adding a browser component to applications would be a pretty big regression.

You want details?

19 tabs. ublock origin, tab search.

The browser process alone (no tabs included) is sitting at about 615 megabytes of RSS. The GPU process is using another 325 megabytes. Ublock origin is using 115 megabytes on top of that. The tabs are varying between 20 megabytes (for the runit documentation, http://smarden.org/runit/), 100 megabytes (browsing a private github repository), 200 megabytes (for a Jupyter notebook with about 10 paragraphs and 3 images shown), to 1.2 gigabytes of memory (Slack tab).

The next fattest program I have currently running is Wireshark. It's at around 200 megabytes of RSS while dealing with a capture containing about half a million packets in the current list view. MPV is surprisingly large, sitting at 110 megabytes -- guessing some of that is buffering the video, but it's still a bit surprising. Sylpheed is also significant, at well over 150 megabytes. And all of the gvim 20-odd gvim and terminal emulator processes add up, each one at close to 20 megabytes of RSS. Evince is also significant, although I've only got 7 or 8 of them running. Each is using about 60 megabytes of RSS.

Still, all non-browsercombined running on my machine come out to about 20% of the RSS size of Chrome, in spite of Chrome processes being 25% of the total number of running processes.

But I suppose you're technically right: Chrome isn't the heaviest thing on my machine -- Those tend to be spark jobs that I spin up. Those are capped to 30 gigabytes. But I don't do much spark these days, so...

I wouldn’t recommend revery to anyone yet, although it is really promising it isn’t anywhere near ready yet.

There's also https://github.com/zserge/webview, gives you the system browser engine in a window, and you can evaluate Javascript from the native side, or call a native function from the Javascript side with a string argument (usually a JSON payload).

The "hello world" which opens a webpage in a window is just a single line of C code and produces a 26 kilobytes executable on macOS.

Wow, I really, really wish I could get this to compile, but MinGW just is not having it.