leptos VS makepad

Lots of new frontend frameworks have been built on top of Rust, including Leptos, which happens to be one of the most popular ones. In this guide, we'll highlight why and how to migrate your JavaScript frontend to use the Leptos Rust frontend framework.

I don't know why OP felt moved to write this weird guide, https://leptos.dev is incredible!

https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos/blob/main/flake.nix

You want a package? Add it to buildInputs.

You want to search a package: https://search.nixos.org/packages (or use the cli)

you want to test a package before adding it? nix-shell -p or nix shell for example.

Heck, even if you want it more easy, you could write a tool in less than 100 lines that adds packages names to .json/.yaml/.toml, which allows you to parse it using the nix language and a simple cli written with bash functions to add/remove packages if you wanted.

That's why it is hard for me to understand this project as a product, it seems like a wrapper to the most basic things :\

We use the fantastic Leptos framework for building the frontend. Besides that, we use the leptos-use utilities for connecting to the WebSocket server, serde for serialization, and rand for generating random numbers.

I'd use https://leptos.dev because you can use a fully typed language (Rust) that is super fast in the backend and also in the frontend (see https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2024/table...)

For the web-side, if you'd like to use Rust end-to-end we've had the best experience with Leptos: https://leptos.dev/

I'd suggest https://leptos.dev/ is worth a look. I haven't used it yet, but plan to soon.

I think a lot of us reach for Jinja-style templates so it feels a little more like we're writing bare HTML. But they're of course still just templates, and they need a build step before they become valid HTML.

So it's true, if you're willing to use a DSL embedded in your server language (like JSX), then you'll have the full language tooling available to you. And this probably isn't giving up much over language-specific templates.

A JSX-equivalent for the Rust server-side rendering world would probably be maud [1] or leptops [2].

[1] https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

[2] https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

I wanted to deploy the app serverlessly, opting for Deno Deploy hosting. The JS fetch example and the leptos-deno examples were handy to get me going.

It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681

> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.

Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrod to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup.

What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere.

And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.

[0] https://github.com/makepad/makepad

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4FCS-oMpg

For those who haven’t seen it, Makepad is also an in-browser code editor with an open-source UI toolkit. Looks like this synth is one of the examples of the UI toolkit.

https://makepad.dev/

And I'm obsessed with what happens when you press Alt in their editor. I never knew I wanted this, but boy, do I want it.

I tried this, using https://makepad.dev our GPU accelerated UI and renderstack. And unfortunately it wasn't a great experience. Text popping forward for whatever reason is not really an improvement (i tried indent depth, syntax highlighting reasons, cursor behavior). Maybe 'veeeeery' subtly could do something, but otherwise you dont want it to break visual symmetry as we are used to

Wow, so they did: https://github.com/makepad/makepad/pull/142

It says on the front page Mac and Web only

https://github.com/makepad/makepad#prerequisites

(windows and linux are coming )

We can! It’s a lot of work because you don’t have the whole JS ecosystem to fall back on, but to some that’s a feature not a bug.

My favorite example of this is https://makepad.dev

And a feature highlight of Code Lens. The idea is borrowed from https://github.com/makepad/makepad

When it comes to compile times, the most optimized Rust codebase I know for optimized for this is makepad.dev [1].

It is compiling from scratch on mac m1 in around 7.5s [2] and that's +100k lines of Rust. However there is close to none dependencies, so this +100k is all there is to compile pretty much.

[1] https://makepad.dev/

[2] https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1467529091284934666