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quasar-proton [WIP]

A fresh take on creating cross-platform apps.

Proton brings a mode to build Quasar Apps that creates tiny, blazing fast binaries for all major desktop platforms. In Quasar's neverending quest for performance and security, the core team is proud to offer an alternative to Electron.

Whether you are just starting out making apps for your meetup or regularly crunch terabyte datasets, we are absolutely confident that you will love using Proton as much as we love making and maintaining it.

Who Proton is For

Anyone who can create a Quasar app can use Proton, as it is merely a new build target. All components and plugins (suitable for Native Desktop) can be used. For the User Interface, nothing has changed, except you will probably notice that everything seems much faster.

Because of the way Proton has been built and can be extended, developers are able to interface not only with the entire Rust ecosystem, but also with many other programming languages. Being freed of the heaviest thing in the universe and the many shortcomings of server-side Javascript suddenly opens up whole new avenues for high-performance, security-focused applications that need the purebred power, agility and community acceptance of a low-level language.

We expect to witness an entire new class of applications being built with Quasar Proton. From a simple calender to locally crunching massive realtime feeds at particle colliders or even mesh-network based distributed message- passing ecosystems - the bar has been raised and gauntlet thrown.

What will you make?

Technical Details

The user interface in Proton apps currently leverages Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and MSHTML (IE10/11) or Webkit via Edge on Windows. Proton is based on the MIT licensed prior work known as webview.

The default binding to the underlying webview library currently uses Rust, but other languages like Golang or Python (and many others) are possible (and only a PR away).

Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — and enable you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more. - https://www.rust-lang.org/

This combination of power, safety and usability are why we chose Rust to be the default binding for Proton. It is our intention to provide the most safe and performant native app experience (for devs and app consumers), out of the box.

To this end, we have spent a great deal of time creating an especially secure localhost-free backend for the security conscious application-artisans. This means that your app does not use a localhost server, as is generally the case with cordova apps. This also has the positive side effect, that less code is needed and the final binaries are smaller.

Less code doesn't always mean something is safer, but it does mean that there is less surface area for attackers to barnacle themselves. - Denjell

Current Status

We are in the process of vetting this new mode. It is not yet available to use without jumping through some development hurdles. If you don't care, please reach out to the team at https://chat.quasar.dev and we'll guide you through the process. Here is a bit of a status report.

Promise based File System Access
App Icons and integration with Icon-Genie
Frameless Mode
Build on MacOS
Build on Linux
Build on Windows
STDOUT Passthrough with Command Invocation
Self Updater
Inter Process Communication (IPC)
Documentation
Filesystem R/W (scoped to permissions)
Secure Cryptographic Enclave
Message Bus
Copy Buffer
API Spec (in progress)
localhost-free mode (🔥)

Comparison between Proton 1 and Electron 5

	Proton	Electron
Binary Size MacOS	2.6 MB	147.7 MB
Memory Consumption MacOS	13 MB	34.1 MB
Benchmark FPS	TODO	TODO
Interface Service Provider	Varies	Chromium
Quasar UI	VueJS	VueJS
Backend Binding	Rust	Node.js (ECMAScript)
Underlying Engine	C++	V8 (C/C++)
FLOSS	Yes	No
Multithreading	Yes	No
Bytecode Delivery	Yes	No
Can Render PDF	Yes	No
Multiple Windows	Yes	Yes
GPU Access	Yes	Yes
Auto Updater	Yes	Yes (1)
Inter Process Communication (IPC)	Yes	Yes
Cross Platform	Yes	Yes
Custom App Icon	Yes	Yes
Windows Binary	Yes	Yes
MacOS Binary	Yes	Yes
Linux Binary	Yes	Yes
iOS Binary	Soon	No
Android Binary	Soon	No
Localhost Server	Yes	Yes
No localhost option	Yes	No

Notes

Electron has no native auto updater on Linux

Relation to Upstream Origins

We have made the decision to fork, enhance and maintain several upstream projects here in this repository, in order to guarantee the security of the code and our ability to enhance it with features that may not be needed for other consumers.

We hope that this code is useful, but make no claims to suitability or guarantees that it will work outside of the Quasar ecosystem.

This has been done with our best attempt at due diligence and in respect of the original authors. Thankyou - this project would never have been possible without your amazing contribution to open-source and we are honoured to carry the torch further. Of special note:

zserge for the original webview approach and go bindings
Boscop for the Rust Bindings
Burtonago for the Cargo Bundle prototype

Documentation

Head over to the Quasar Framework official website: https://quasar.dev

Stay in Touch

For latest releases and announcements, follow on Twitter: @quasarframework

Chat Support

Get realtime help at the official community Discord server: https://chat.quasar.dev

Community Forum

Ask complicated questions at the official community forum: https://forum.quasar.dev

Contributing

Please make sure to read the Contributing Guide before making a pull request. If you have a Quasar-related project/component/tool, add it with a pull request to this curated list!

Thank you to all the people who already contributed to Proton!

Semver

quasarframework/proton is following Semantic Versioning 2.0.

Licenses

MIT or MIT/Apache where applicable.

Logo: CC-BY-NC-ND

Original Proton Logo Design by Daniel Thompson-Yvetot
Based on the prior work by Emanuele Bertoldi

Name: The proper name of this project is "Quasar Proton", and is to be used in all citations.

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