That explains the massive rise in segfaults since they got acquired.
It’s approaching being as buggy as claude code which I’ve had to stop using even though I have 6 months free of max because it just crashes and freezes all the time.
Hey HN, Electrobun creator here. Thanks for posting this.
We just hit v1 - stable which means I've locked down the architecture. If you run into any bugs or need specific apis that you miss from Electron or Tauri please open Github issues and I'll prioritize them. I shipped 50,000 lines of code changes stabilizing and polishing electrobun for v1 over the last month.
Here's a video demo of Colab (also open source) (a hybrid web browser + code editor + PTY terminal) that is built with Electrobun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWTCqGmE86w
Electrobun uses the system webview by default, but a lot of the hello worlds feature the bundleCEF option. Because Electrobun is architected to be webview agnostic when servo and ladybird are ready they should be drop-in alternatives.
Electrobun apps also auto generate a zstd self-extraction wrapper and patch files with every release, so your initial download will be much smaller than if you'd used zip and your updates will be as small as 14KB so you can ship as often as you like without you or your users paying the bandwidth tax.
You make some very good points but I would argue that many if not all the people you observe “without introspection” have enough to know they’re getting dummer but they don’t care because they never liked the art of writing code itself or problem solving they just liked getting a paycheck and are relieved that they can still have output their managers don’t fire them over with far less effort.
They see the same thing as you but are overjoyed to power down their brain and spend more time thinking about their personal hobbies and sports and 90 day fiance instead of real problem solving or code.
I have been giving it about the same amount of context as a large github/jira/whatever issue.
But i’m giving it a goal with a fairly distant milestone where it needs to hit 5-10 smaller milestones and even for advanced ai mixing the system languages I’m mixing in this large project there are build errors it powers through on its own (fixing the building, linking, or syntax, or using the apis for the versions of all the things i’m using) and there are some combinations of tech (windowing, webviews, etc.) and some architectures of things that require it to try multiple approaches to succeed.
Sometimes it will ask like “how am i doing so far should i continue”, or can you run this visual thing and report back. But there can be 30-60 mins between it doing that.
It also has to scan a lot of files and find the things it needs to find to fill its own context. Like “let me examine how you implemented that on mac and windows and come up with a solution for linux”
Other times while it’s reasoning if i notice it’s going down a rabbit hole I’ll point it out and set it in the right direction without interrupting it and when it moves onto the next thought it’ll incorporate my suggestion but it didn’t really stop or need another big prompt or goal.
There are plenty of times where I do need to step in and baby it with small goals through something tricky or obscure. But even in those cases I don’t have to write any code directly i just ask it to do xyz small change and hand it back for me to test
I installed claude code (an agentic ai that runs on your machine and can browse and edit code, run the build, and use unix commands)
This has largely taken me out of the loop. I give it detailed task like I would a junior engineer, and we discuss approaches and align on direction, priorities, and goals, and it then goes off for literally hours iterating on the code.
I have done about 3 months worth of extremely complex engineering work in about a week since I started doing this.
It is a step change from trying to use the chat interface and copy/pasting snippets.
Once it’s going it writes code like a staff engineer.
There are some obscure bugs it can run into that it needs my 20 years of experience to unblock or unwind when it goes down a rabbit hole.
But it has accelerated my development 500x and while it’s iterating I’m not filling my mind with code and syntax and so on, I’m more like a tech lead or manager now. I’m in another room playing with my dog.
It’s an alternative to Electron/Tauri that uses Bun.
It has a bsdiff based update mechanism that lets you ship updates as small as 4KB, a custom zstd self extractor that makes your app bundle as small as 12MB, and more.
I’m currently working on adding Windows and Linux support.
I’m using bun for the main process. Bun runs a zig binary which can call objc/c methods. So the “main native application thread” is technically the zig process.
Then there’s all kinds of fancy rpc between bun and zig and between bun and browser contexts.
Electrobun is in the very early stages. The roadmap is a bit out of date. Here are some highlights:
- it’s like Tauri in that it uses the system webview and does not bundle chromium
- it’s like Electron in that it bundles Bun instead of Node for the main process so you just write typescript for both the main and browser contexts
- native bindings written in c/objc with a zig wrapper that the bun process runs
- it will be cross platform, but working on stability first
- the cli handles updates code signing and everything else you need and outputs build artifacts that you just need to upload to S3 or any static file host.
- it has a custom optimized bsdiff implementation in zig that autogenerates updates for your app as small as 4KB
- it has a custom zig self extracting mechanism that uses zstd so your initial download is also as small as can be.
- it has a custom encrypted easy to use RPC mechanism between bun and browser processes where you just write method signatures and handlers.
- it has a custom OOPIF implementation so you can embed isolated browser contexts with your html <electrobun-webview> element that are performant and easy to use so you could build a multi tab web browser with it if you wanted.
https://bsky.app/profile/yoav.codes