Does any julia-based GUI app (.exe/executable/installer) exists for Windows or Linux?

sylvaticus · January 13, 2021, 2:50pm

Out of curiosity, the topic on crowdfunding for a GUI ML project make me asking if does any project (not necessarily related to ML) exist that uses PackageCompiler.jl to produce a self-contained julia-base GUI app for Windows or Linux… any example ?

Gnimuc · January 13, 2021, 3:00pm

sylvaticus · January 13, 2021, 3:04pm

ok, but does any actual publicly available GUI app exists ?

Gnimuc · January 13, 2021, 3:07pm

what do you mean by “publicly available”? download links for App binaries?

sylvaticus · January 13, 2021, 3:16pm

Yes, if there is any example I can just download & run… And even better if there exists any “real app”, in the sense that does something, not just for demonstrative purposes…

Gnimuc · January 13, 2021, 3:44pm

I did upload one, but only for macOS.

https://github.com/Gnimuc/Redux.jl/releases

barche · January 13, 2021, 4:06pm

I made a small example using QML.jl. The kids love it

sylvaticus · January 13, 2021, 8:05pm

nice… did you release it also as a self-contained binary executable?

barche · January 13, 2021, 10:34pm

Yes, it’s in the releases:

https://github.com/barche/TimesTables.jl/releases/tag/v0.1.1

giordano · January 13, 2021, 11:10pm

At least in the Linux tarball, symlinks aren’t symlinks but text files with the path of the target as content

liuyxpp · January 14, 2021, 1:26am

I have tried your MacOS app. Two concerns:

The size of the binary is just too large.
It is too slow to start it for the first time.

If it is normal for GUI app written in Julia, I’d say Julia still has a long way to go in GUI app development: the user experience is so painful.

sylvaticus · January 14, 2021, 8:37am

yep, for example TimesTablesApp/lib/julia/libjulia.so.1 is a text file whose content is libjulia.so.1.5 instead of being a symlink to it…

(obviously then the executable doesn’t work…)

barche · January 14, 2021, 10:24am

Yes, I didn’t actually test the linux binary myself. I’m guessing it’s because I use 7z to create the archive, this probably needs a platform-dependent if clause around it:

github.com

barche/TimesTables.jl/blob/f2795816725123b436139f266e19ce68eb1d3823/.github/workflows/build-app.yml#L34


      
                - x64
          steps:
            - uses: actions/checkout@v2
            - uses: julia-actions/setup-julia@latest
              with:
                version: ${{ matrix.version }}
                arch: ${{ matrix.arch }}
            - uses: julia-actions/julia-buildpkg@latest
            - run: julia -e 'using Pkg; pkg"add PackageCompiler"'
            - run: julia -e 'using PackageCompiler; create_app(pwd(), "TimesTablesApp"; precompile_statements_file="test/precompile_statements.jl")'
            - run: 7z a TimesTablesApp-$RUNNER_OS.zip TimesTablesApp
            - name: Upload Release Asset
              id: upload-release-asset 
              uses: actions/upload-release-asset@v1
              env:
                GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
              with:
                upload_url: ${{ github.event.release.upload_url }} # This pulls from the CREATE RELEASE step above, referencing it's ID to get its outputs object, which include a `upload_url`. See this blog post for more info: https://jasonet.co/posts/new-features-of-github-actions/#passing-data-to-future-steps 
                asset_path: ./TimesTablesApp-${{ runner.os }}.zip
                asset_name: TimesTablesApp-${{ runner.os }}.zip
                asset_content_type: application/zip

kristoffer.carlsson · January 14, 2021, 10:26am

Note that the very first time you start something in mac, the OS does a bunch of extra checks which makes it a lot slower. The second time is faster. (It might still be slow though, depends on the application).

barche · January 14, 2021, 10:36am

I think the PackageCompiler developers are aware of the size issue, but since we need to ship the Julia runtime it’s never going to be small. Another issue specific to this case is that our Qt package is monolithic, so we’re shipping a lot more Qt libs than needed here. Anyway, it seems like large binaries are a trend, for example the element.io chat app is also a 100 MB download, and that is just a wrapper around a website… (no excuse not to do our best to limit sizes here, of course).

Regarding the speed: I’m a bit disappointed myself, I assume this will get better and it may also be in part due to CxxWrap, which is not that precompilation friendly, apparently.

A third problem on Mac is that it doesn’t actually start unless you quench the security features, otherwise you have to manually allow every included library to open. Similar warnings appear on Windows.

oheil · January 14, 2021, 12:18pm

Motivated by this thread I have created a standalone app (windows only) of a toy project https://github.com/oheil/PlayGround.jl which uses CImGUI.

The build steps (very few) can be seen in the Readme.md

A ZIP archive for windows can be downloaded here: https://github.com/oheil/PlayGroundApp/raw/main/PlayGroundApp.zip

Unpack and double click on PlayGroundApp\bin\PlayGround.exe

Pro’s:

PackageCompiler works out of the box
the standalone executable doesn’t show any issues

Con’s (confirming already mentioned concerns from previous posters):

Package (the ZIP archive to download) is too large
Console window is shown (should be suppressed)
Startup time is not so short as expected (a splash screen would be nice). It is faster to create a sysimage, than run Julia and the startup command manually.

All in all I am very pleased with the outcome. Until now I have only read about the possibility to create something standalone and I knew I would want it sometimes, but never tried it. The Con’s are not so nice and should be addressed somehow, but, for me, they aren’t a show stopper right now.

giordano · January 14, 2021, 12:41pm

I wouldn’t add a binary blob, especially such a large one, to the Git repository. It bloats the history in a very bad way

oheil · January 14, 2021, 12:43pm

Too late
It’s only a play ground, nothing serious. If the large file annoys me, I will remove it again (and the history).

barche · January 14, 2021, 1:46pm

Note that you can also trigger github to build the binary for you, and automatically attach it to a release, see the workflow files in TimesTables.jl.

oheil · January 14, 2021, 1:53pm

We wanted to let you know that you’ve used 80% of your data plan for Git LFS on your personal account oheil. No immediate action is necessary, but you might want to consider purchasing additional data packs to cover your bandwidth and storage usage:

Well, it starts to annoy…