u/simonhamp

I've applied what we've been doing on mobile to building a fully native Mac app, and... it works!

(Content warning: Heavy British sarcasm used throughout, but don't let that distract you from the reality of the discussion.)

> Prove it

I've posted a tweet about it for now with just a couple of screenshots. I'm not linking to it; you can easily find me on that hole of a website that just keeps sucking me in. In fact, I'm not going to link to anything as I'm sure I'll be accused of some kind of self-promotion.

More will come if folks are keen for this.

> Why u do dis?

Web views just aren't great ways to build great apps. They're convenient, but they're crap.

I mean, sorry all you Electron/Tauri/Capacitor folks, they're fine if you want a mediocre app or to spend months of your life debugging performance issues.

But if you want a real native app that feels really at-home on the user's device, then your best option is to build real native apps.

Sadly there aren't really any good cross-platform solutions for that problem (don't come at me with Qt's and GTK's, those aren't "good" by any stretch of the imagination).

And certainly none for the PHP gang.

Also, I wanted to nail a few things in one go for what we've been doing on Desktop up until now:

1. Get rid of Electron - it's just so heavy and comes with a bunch of gotchas. Plus having node and npm packages in the build process is continuing to scare me. aint nobody got time for that.
2. Don't replace it with Tauri - yes it's lighter, yes it's Rust so the purists can be happy. Sadly it's just swapping one mediocre solution for another.
3. Drop the PHP built-in server - yep that's what we currently use. Yes it's a crutch (that has worked pretty well!), but the time has come for better stability and better performance, and we have everything we need now to make it work without it.

This manages all of that and a little more to boot. This PoC app I've built is just 24MB. Granted it's a PoC, so it's likely to grow from there, but it's a far cry from the minimum 130MB+ just for Electron.

> So how does it work?

In case you haven't been following along what we've been doing on mobile - or perhaps you've been intentionally ignoring it because you have some bones to pick with either the name, the team, or the fact that it's using your favourite language in some profane way - we have cracked a very performant way to run PHP (>120fps ... like wayyyy greater than) and build reactive, native UIs without having it behave like a web server.

In fact, it behaves more like a game engine. It's very light on resource usage, has a ton of affordances already for native UI elements and allows you to write very idiomatic PHP code. All that without fundamentally changing PHP's core. Just adding our own extension.

We call it SuperNative. It kinda even looks a bit HTML-like, if you use Blade and squint hard enough. But deep down it's just PHP classes that compile to a custom binary format.

So there's no IPC, no HTTP calls, no multiple processes just to spin up an app. It's PHP compiled as an embed (exactly how we do it on mobile), embedded into the shell applications (in this case, a Swift macOS app), and called directly.

The application literally becomes a PHP interpreter. It boots PHP into an isolated thread that it keeps alive, feeding it messages and reading its output, all through shared memory.

Did I mention it's very fast? We're now measuring round-trips from button presses, through PHP and back out to the UI in microseconds (yup µs). And we can spin up multiple PHP threads as needed, in milliseconds (ms). And that's with a full Laravel application in there!

(Don't worry, it's still just PHP... if someone wants to help us make this not dependent on Laravel, or work with other frameworks, we'd be happy to have the support!)

All of this already works on mobile, and we're just starting to explore bringing it to the desktop.

> What's the catch?

Our focus is on mobile as way more people seem to want that. But there are a few people still wanting advancement in the desktop space, so that's what we're trying to deliver.

This is only working on macOS for now, and it's just a proof of concept, but I'd love to tackle Mac, Windows and Linux all together.

To be able to do that, we gotta get some more sponsorship (you can sponsor nativephp on GitHub - you know how to use a browser and URLs, so I'll leave you to figure it out) and maybe then we can afford to take on yet another crazy huge project.

If this is at all interesting to you and you wanna help make it a reality, please reach out. I'm always open to chat irl and much prefer it to having anons sling zero-effect insults at me across Reddit.

tl;dr: SuperNative makes NativePHP for Mobile fully native, driving native views in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, exposing blistering performance.

In beta now.