makepad VS Rocket

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

At the bottom of the Rocket web site there are a few sponsors listed Kindness.ai, ohne Makler, 1Password, Signal Insight, and Edwin Olback. There are more sponsors on GitHub sponsors page

4. Rocket

If you want something simpler/more minimal, you could use https://rocket.rs/ for the backend and handle the front-end however you want.

I’m the author of https://kellnr.io. When I started working on Kellnr three years ago, https://rocket.rs was “the web framework” to use. Unfortunately, the project seems dead. Before adding more functionality using an unmaintained framework, I want to port Kellnr to https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum.

Or else you could of course just use https://rocket.rs/

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

I've done some research but I have to admit that creating embedded devices is a totally new subject for me, but that is the point of the project - main goal is learning, and creating something is the secondary goal, so please bear with me and my knowledge of the subject. So, for the hardware I've seen many people recommending SMT32 family devices, but I've also read that anything with the Cortex-M processor can be suitable. Need more info on that. OS is a hard choice for me because on one hand I was thinking of Ubuntu Core but the device support is not really that good I think, so other options I've found are Tock and RIOT-OS, and I am gravitating towards the latter because it's main focus is on IOT devices. I've found frameworks like Rocket.rs for a web app, tauri.app for desktop app (which might not be needed but I still like the idea). Also found Tokio.rs which apparently will help with the networking. There was a discussion from the other members about using the Golioth cloud platform with Zephyr and C++, and I don't know if there are any other alternatives for Golioth that support Rust, I've found webthings.io but I am not sure if it's an alternative, or something else actually, so I would be happy to learn more about that. Again I want to hear your recommendations regarding anything that will help creating a project like that.