Electrobun

Electrobun is an open-source desktop app framework from Blackboard that covers building, updating and shipping cross-platform desktop applications. The main process can be written in TypeScript, Zig, Rust, Go or Odin, and the project says a hello world using the system webview is about a megabyte. It is distributed under the MIT license and is paired with Dash, a companion IDE built with Electrobun.

What It Is

Electrobun aims to be a solution-in-a-box for desktop apps. Hutch is the native build and workspace CLI, Bun is the default JavaScript runtime, and Cottontail is an experimental JSC-based alternative. Developers start with hutch electrobun init, bunx electrobun init or npx electrobun init and pick from published templates, which the site says number 30.

Size, Updates and Rendering Options

Apps ship as self-extracting bundles using Zstandard compression. A Zig-optimized BSDIFF implementation can produce kilobyte-scale updates, falling back to a compressed full download when needed. Developers who prefer consistency over size can bundle and pin Chromium with the bundleCEF flag, or use bundleWGPU to drive a native GPU surface without a webview. Three.js and Babylon.js adapters work in the Bun main process, and <electrobun-webview> and <electrobun-wgpu> elements composite isolated webviews and GPU surfaces.

Develop and Ship with Dash

Dash is a general-purpose IDE that keeps code, terminals, Git, scripts and coding agents such as Claude Code or Codex together. It can build and test on connected Mac, Windows and Linux machines. The site states that release builds are signed and notarized, with updates served from any static host.

Platform Support

macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 11+ x64 and Ubuntu 24.04+ are listed as official. Windows 11+ ARM64 is beta, and other Linux distros with GTK3 and webkit2gtk-4.1 are community-supported.