I’ve looked at things like tauri and the problem is always Windows. In general if you have a broadly distributed Windows app you must bundle or statically link everything. Even chained dependency installers don’t work since you have to keep them up to date, and fetching them online doesn’t work because it will fail in weird environments with filtered Internet access. All Windows installers must contain a microcosm of the entire universe.
I suppose if you could restrict to only Windows 11 it might help but there is still a ton of Windows 10 (and even 7!) out there. Does Windows 11 finally bundle Microsoft’s own standard C libraries?
I think the right path forward might be something like Sciter or Ultralight or even just a very stripped down version of Chromium. A web renderer is not that huge when it's stripped down and all the extensions and stuff a desktop app is not going to need are removed. You end up with something about as big as Qt or another cross-platform full stack UI toolkit.
Huh? Windows 10 has been shipping the C standard library for quite a while now, you don’t need to ship any redistributables... yes you need to static link the C++ standard library but that is also a requirement if you ship on Linux since Debian/Ubuntu always have horrendously outdated copies, heck I have customers that still use Ubuntu 16 that I have to support.
At the end of the day none of this is any different from shipping containers or flatpaks, which bundle all the dependencies with them. In many ways Windows has escaped the DLL hell that plagued it in the past, whereas Linux still has some learning to do.
I suppose if you could restrict to only Windows 11 it might help but there is still a ton of Windows 10 (and even 7!) out there. Does Windows 11 finally bundle Microsoft’s own standard C libraries?
I think the right path forward might be something like Sciter or Ultralight or even just a very stripped down version of Chromium. A web renderer is not that huge when it's stripped down and all the extensions and stuff a desktop app is not going to need are removed. You end up with something about as big as Qt or another cross-platform full stack UI toolkit.