ada-spark-rfcs VS accesskit

Original discussion was there, I guess you can post your comments to that PR to keep the discussion in one place.

I forgot where I saw it, but I do recall reading somewhere that the ARG had discussed whether a shorter revision cycle would be better or not. I wouldn't be surprised if the creation of this ( https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs ) was inspired by that discussion.

Ada might be getting pattern matching soon too:

https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs/blob/master/protot...

> I did some ADA in the past and yes, it is a nice language, but it lacks the modernity and a dynamic community like Rust. ADA did received some nice update to its specification, but, just like C++, it struggle / cannot really fit the latest innovation in programming language that easily.

I'm still learning both Ada and Rust, nevertheless I humbly disagree. The more I learn it and other "old" languages the more it looks to me like "modern" ones rediscover things that have been present in other languages for years.

The really significant difference I can see for now is that Ada is not focused so strongly on functional programming paradigm. Rust borrow checker is a strong success of course and was another significant difference, but latest SPARK got borrow checking capabilities too, AFAIK.

While Ada's open-source community is smaller, I find it as energetic and devoted to improving the ecosystem as Rust's. I have no idea about closed-source community, but in the past 4 years ArianeGroup [1], Airbus [2] and Nvidia [3] talked about choosing Ada for their high-integrity applications.

> And to be fair, it is fine. ADA is very much a "committee" language (its spec are ISO/IEC) instead of a "community" language (all the spec and rfc of Rust are on github and anyone can easily discuss them).

You can discuss Ada/SPARK RFCs here: https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs . I think I once saw on Ada forum or chat that someone proposing changes to the language was simply invited to talk to people working on the standard, so it doesn't look like the language is developed in isolation or something.

> This makes it so that ADA doesn't get the attention, and the rapidity of innovation, that a language like Rust does, but ADA is mostly made for program that will need to be maintained in critical operations for decades with the code being maintainable and compilable far into the future.

I think that Ada adopted quiet quickly to standards set by Rust: lower entry barrier toolchain, compelling licensing, library distribution, RFCs, etc. And in terms of language features, in many areas it's not only on par, but ahead of competition. So you're less likely to see lots of changes, but they do happen nevertheless. I'm not saying Ada is perfect, of course. There are parts of it that other languages do better. No shame in that.

IMHO, the reason Ada is unknown to many people is a combination of its past, myths surrounding it, and general trend of people to follow trends. ;) But I currently find Ada/SPARK even more compelling option than Rust, even though I like both.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/ArianeGroup/posts/2872955946126067

There's a proposal to allow dot syntax for untagged types as well.

There's also an active discussion about adding format strings to the language here: https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs/pull/77

If you were to implement this yourself, i'd look into either swash or cosmic-text for the text rendering stack (this is one of the things you really don't want to write from the ground up). For accessibility, AccessKit has quickly become the standard for communicating with crossplatform accessibility APIs in rust GUI. lightningcss (or its lower level counterpart cssparser) are both decent options for CSS parsing. Taffy handles some of what browsers offer for a layout engine, but is still being worked on.

> Fleet relies on the Java AWT/Swing framework to get a window from an operating system, but it doesn’t use the Java platform for managing its GUI components besides one JFrame and JPanel on top of it.

This is a terrible decision that is going to bite them in the long run. Doing things this way makes it far, far more difficult to implement accessibility, and regulations on this are only going to get stricter.

Implementing accessibility for a framework like that would involve three separate implementations for three separate platforms and the need to interface with D-Bus, COM and Objective C, from Java. I imagine that the latter two would be particularly difficult, considering how bad Java's FFI support is. It's not just calling methods either, you'd actually need to implement your own classes that conform to the relevant COM interfaces / Objective C protocols. There are libraries that can help with this[1], but I don't think they would work particularly well for something as complex as a code editor.

[1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

fltk-accesskit is an accesskit integration crate for fltk-rs, the gui crate. It's implemented as an external crate to allow for more experimentation before stabilizing the api, especially since fltk is at version 1.4.

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Using HarfBuzz makes sense. But if you're looking for a pure-Rust alternative, I hear cosmic-text (made by Pop!_OS) is good. There's also AccessKit for accessibility.

There are efforts to support a cross platform accessibility library:

https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

egui is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust, and I just released 0.20. It's a big release!

There is now support for AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) which brings accessibility to egui (a first for an immediate mode GUI?).

There is also better table support, nicer keyboard shortcut handling, better looking text in light mode (still not great, but better).

See more in the changelog: https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Try it out at www.egui.rs