blitz VS trunk

Have you talked to the Dioxus people recently?

They're working on a project called Dioxus Blitz; from what I'm told, they're trying to implement a minimal browser target, that provides some basic DOM-like features and renders with wgpu.

It's not exactly what you're hoping for, but you might find common ground.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

(Also, the Linebender project is working on Masonry, with FFI as a medium-term goal.)

Your proposal sounds very similar to what the Dioxus folks are doing on Blitz, which is using HTML/CSS as the languages but doing native rendering. WebF seems much further along, and I know they've been exploring other rendering engines, so it may be an interesting conversation for you to have with them.

Others have already mentioned inlyne and blitz, however given that you're interested in combining web UI with game/wgpu rendering you may be more interested in bevy_ui (and the higher level APIs like bevy_ui_dsl and belly that sit on top of this). Bevy UI is working on a HTML model and is specifically designed to integrate with Bevy's main game renderer and other infrastructure. It's worth noting that a 0.11 release of Bevy of due in next few days, and that UI is going to be a strong focus of the 0.12 release cycle: which should lead to significant development of bevy_ui, and either a doubling down on the "HTML-like UI" approach or a pivot to a new approach.

Here is an example: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/master/examples/buttons.rs

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

You may also be interested in https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz which aims to be a full HTML+CSS renderer on top of wgpu (but is currently not nearly as complete as inlyne).

If you are focused on performance we are working on a native renderer for Dioxus called Blitz. It is very incomplete right now, but in the future it will be much more performant than the current webview based approach.

There hasn't been too much progress on Blitz in the last few weeks (it will come), but there is now a new project Freya which is using a Dioxus frontend and rendering with Skia. That's currently using it's own layout system instead of Taffy though.

The main desktop renderer for Dioxus uses wry (the webview tauri uses internally), so the startup time will likely be similar. We are working on a native renderer called blitz which should improve this, but development is still early

Trunk is a WASM web application bundler for Rust. Trunk uses a simple, optional-config pattern for building & bundling WASM, JS snippets & other assets (images, css, scss) via a source HTML file. - Trunk

Note that Leptos uses Trunk to serve the client side application. Trunk is a zero-config Wasm web application bundler for Rust.

I've been using Rust and WASM for my latest front-end project, and I think this setup is a viable alternative to commonly used JS frameworks for those willing to put in some effort to ramp up on new technology. Addressing the concerns from the article:

"No universal import system" - Rust has it's own module system and Cargo is used for managing dependencies, no need to worry about different module systems.

"Layers of minification, uglification, and transpilation." Just compile Rust to WASM file for the browser, same as using any other compile target.

"Wildly different environments." Something that you'll still need to deal with. Some runtime dependencies are system-specific (code running on the browser usually needs access to Web APIs, and JavaScript, code running on the server can't access WebAPIs but can access the system clock and filesystem. Sometimes separate libraries or separate runtime configs are needed (e.g. configurable time source)

"Overemphasis on file structure." Not a problem for imports, but you may still have file structure dependencies things like CSS, image resources etc.

"Configuration hell." Pretty much non-existent once you have your Rust compiler setup locally.

"Development parity." Just use trunk: https://trunkrs.dev/, to watch, build and serve, config is minimal.

Trunk, the Rust-equivalent of Webpack & Vite, comes with tailwind built-in. You heard that right! You don't even need to install the tailwind CLI via npm or something like that. No more package.json! <3

Can you not use dioxus with "trunk" (https://trunkrs.dev/) ?

Thanks a lot! As I said in an earlier comment, building this allowed me to explore a lot of features of rust like Traits, Dynamic Dispatch, Pattern Matching, Const evaluation, Static variables, etc. and that on top of that trying to figure out how to conveniently port it to WASM was also a nice learning experience. I am currently using trunk as a bundler which ties in neatly with a GitHub action but before that, I tried cargo-run-wasm, which felt a little hacky. So overall a whole lot of learning.

Here here. I don't think programmers - as a group - get to complain about people not learning programming tools while simultaneously making them so unapproachable (especially Linux things).

It's not just the overuse of acronyms. There's also:

* Religious devotion to the CLI despite it having terrible discoverability.

* Really bad naming. Git is probably the worst offender at this, but the whole of Unix is a naming mess. WTF is `usr`? Is that where user files go?

* Generally over-complicated tooling. A good example of this is Node/NPM. So complicated to set up! Contrast it with https://trunkrs.dev/

* Deification of distro packages. No I do not want to spend half of my development time packaging my app for 10 different distros. I guess I'll go with curl | bash then.

* Distain for binary app distribution. I'm looking at you glibc.

I used Notan for drawing the game board in combination with the excellent egui for adding UI elements. It was surprisingly easy to bring it to web with Trunk.

Hi, the author of MailCrab here :-) Yew is nice, especially if you enjoy writing Rust. However, it definitely takes more time and dedication than writing a frontend in React, Vue etc. Yew and the surrounding ecosystem keeps improving, and it is way more usable than when I first tried it. The tooling I used (Trunk https://trunkrs.dev/) is very minimal with respect to the number of features compared to many of the popular web-bundlers (Webpack etc.) but it works well for most simple use-cases.

Yew is way way nicer in that regard because it uses Trunk which is very excellent and you don't have to deal with any of that really. Just trunk serve and away you go. Plus you get the advantage of not having to deal with Javascript. Typescript is nice, but it's no Rust.