What is wry?

Wry is a library that lets developers embed web content (like a website or web app) inside desktop applications written in Rust. Instead of building a traditional desktop app from scratch, you can use familiar web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the user interface, and Wry handles displaying that content in a native window on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. At a high level, Wry acts as a bridge between your Rust application and the web rendering engine available on each platform. On Windows it uses Microsoft Edge's web engine, on macOS it uses WebKit, and on Linux it uses WebKitGTK. You tell Wry what URL or web content to display, it creates a window, and handles all the platform-specific details so you don't have to. The library also supports more advanced features like custom URL schemes (for loading local assets), drag-and-drop handling, and running JavaScript code from your Rust backend. Developers building desktop applications would use this library when they want to use web technologies for their user interface instead of native UI frameworks. A common example is Tauri, a framework that uses Wry to let you build lightweight desktop apps with web frontends. You might use it if you're already comfortable with web development and want to ship a cross-platform app without learning native UI toolkits, or if you have an existing web app and want to package it as a standalone desktop application. One notable aspect is that Wry requires your application to have an event loop running, a core loop that listens for user interactions and system events. Different windowing libraries like winit or tao handle this, and Wry integrates with them. On Linux specifically, you need to manage GTK (a graphical toolkit) alongside your event loop, and you'll need to install some system dependencies. The library also offers optional features you can enable or disable depending on your needs, like developer tools, custom protocols, and drag-and-drop support.