Alcro

A small library to build desktop apps using Rust and modern web technologies. It uses Chrom(e/ium) or similar browsers like MS Edge (new) for UI. It does not bundle Chrome but instead communicates with the existing Chrome installation. Thus Rust functions can be called from the UI and JavaScript can be called from Rust.

Name

Alcro works similarily to the go library lorca so the name alcro is an anagram of lorca. However it uses pipes unlike lorca which uses a websocket.

Documentation

docs.rs

Examples

https://github.com/Srinivasa314/alcro/tree/master/examples

Features

• Small applications
• Use web technologies for UI and use safe and fast rust code.
• Fully async API running on the tokio runtime
• Can control and get position, size and state of window
• Expose rust functions to Javascript
• Call any JS code from rust
• Exposed rust functions are async and every invocation from JS runs as its own tokio task
• Load HTML from url, local file or even embedded files
• JS console messages and exceptions can optionally be logged to stdout, stderr or a file
• Can run in headless mode
• Supports running many windows sharing a single browser instance (UI::new_window)

Limitations

• Requires Chrom(e/ium) to be installed
• Native systray, etc. needs third party crates

How it works

Alcro uses the Chrome DevTools protocol and communicates with it via a pipe.