When you just need to build a tiny desktop app: TinyJS

As the world’s billionaires anxiously plot datacenters to run trillions of lines of AI-generated slop code, one software engineer has zagged in a completely different direction: building an ecosystem for writing and running small apps that run on desktop computers, like it was 1992 all over again. Self-described “maker of things” Tarwin Stroh-Spijer has created a JavaScript runtime, called TinyJS, for making very small applications (many occupying ~6MB or less on disk) for macOS, Linux or Windows. To be clear, TinyJS is not a “no code” framework with hobbled capabilities. It offers the full programming power of JavaScript, along with the visual rendering and communication capabilities of the underlying OS. The trick to TinyJS’s frugality is that it uses the WebView window of each OS, utilizing the built-in browser engine to visually render the app, rather than implementing a UI layer from scratch. …