You're absolutely right. I tried building Upscayl with Tauri initially, but after a few days I had to give up because I was trading my time for bundle size. Then I tried Neutralino only to discover that it does not support node runtime. With Electron, we were able to focus on the core features and ship Upscayl very fast.
Since electron is also the only framework that supports node modules, it was pretty much the best low-resistance path for us at the moment.
I do wanna learn Rust eventually but that is an adventure for another day :)
You deserve credit for this tool. I used it on a 35mm slide taken in 1982 that was scanned using a Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 9000 ED. The original image was around 4000x3000 pixels. I ran it through and resized it back down and it's impressively better.
The binary at 160MB ran flawlessly on a HP Dev One laptop with Debian sid and processed the image in about 10 minutes. The difference is remarkable.
You have done a brilliant job of getting a simple front end on top of a huge pile of complicated under the hood by doing the smart thing: using your time efficiently so you can focus on the hard parts of the puzzle.
If Rust is too much of an adventure, maybe you'll find Go easier. Wails [1] is great if perhaps a bit more rough round the edges. Because it's go, package sizes are 10mb+ but nothing like Electron 30mb+
As someone venturing in Tauri as primarily a web dev, I can relate to this so much. Rust is great and Tauri has some stellar benefits, but until you really master the borrow mechanics, it slows you down so much.
Since electron is also the only framework that supports node modules, it was pretty much the best low-resistance path for us at the moment.
I do wanna learn Rust eventually but that is an adventure for another day :)