piet
xilem
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piet | xilem | |
---|---|---|
11 | 14 | |
1,225 | 2,780 | |
2.0% | 9.4% | |
4.9 | 8.9 | |
12 days ago | about 18 hours ago | |
Rust | Rust | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
piet
- Cairo – Open-Source 2D Graphics Layer/API with Fonts and Many Back-Ends
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A simple 2d graphic library
You can even check https://github.com/linebender/piet and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/tiny-skia. They are pure rust libraries. Skia as a whole is a big binary to add.
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Druid, a Rust-native UI toolkit, released v0.8 after two years of work by 80 contributors.
First, at the deepest level, we are moving away from Piet, which is a cross-platform 2D graphics abstraction. Under the hood it uses whatever the standard OS API is. Instead we will be using Vello which we have been building as a research project for years already. It is starting to near its v0.1, which is very exciting. Fundamentally it is a novel GPU accelerated 2D rendering engine with a strong focus on performance. It is not ready for benchmarks yet, but we're confident it will deliver. If you're curious, you can check out the Vello roadmap for 2023.
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What 2D graphics library would you most recommend?
you can use piet, although that is more of an abstraction over existing, platform-dependent libraries. So not really pure rust, but definitely cross-platform.
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Piet-GPU Progress: Clipping
Piet is the backend for the Druid UI framework. It is indeed cross-platform. The SVG backend looks like it would work without an OS, but I'm not sure the value of a GUI toolkit without an OS anyway :)
https://github.com/linebender/piet#backends
https://github.com/linebender/druid/tree/master/druid-shell/...
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Looking for an image manipulation library that can add text to images. (and has documentation for it)
Piet can render text. You can use Piet_common with the BitMapTarget to generate images Here is an example.
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Simple graphics library using software rendering?
Piet (https://github.com/linebender/piet) should work.
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What Graphics Library to use?
So the 3 I'm looking at right now are 1. druid 1. piet 1. bevy
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Rust GUI: Introduction, a.k.a. the state of Rust GUI libraries (As of January 2021)
It relies on piet 2D graphic library; on Linux that means GTK/Cairo 2D primitives
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Patrick Walton heading up Facebook's Rust team
You may be interested in taking a look at piet!
xilem
- Xilem – An experimental Rust architecture for reactive UI
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Graphite: In-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that is FOSS
The web browser gives us an extremely frictionless development and deployment process. Our CI generates a fully deploy at a unique link for every commit which lets us open and test PRs with a single click. It deploys updates to users without needing to make them go through an updater. In these relatively early stages of our development process, the importance of the velocity that gives us cannot be understated. Plus, the ability for users to try it out in one second is quite helpful.
I've designed the whole architecture specifically to avoid the web UI "feeling like a web app" with the subtle latency of interacting with the site. I wrote all-custom UI components using the minimal amount of HTML and CSS to achieve the requirements instead of depending on an external component framework which always loves nesting dozens of `div`s inside each other to achieve what should be doable in one or two. And our highly-lightweight JS which calls into Rust (Wasm) lets it keep the slow logic out of slow JS. And we are using Svelte to move most of the frontend DOM management logic from runtime to compile time. This architecture really helps us keep performance levels as close as possible to feeling native despite using the web for its GUI rendering; and I believe it has succeeded at feeling responsive by comparison to most other web apps you use (even Slack, for example, which shouldn't be nearly as complex).
Web lets us build fast, deploy the latest version to users fast, leverage prevalent developer experience with HTML/CSS for creating GUIs, and avoid getting stuck in a box with Rust's currently-immature GUI ecosystem. That's the tradeoff we had to make early on, and it was a good decision. But we will eventually move towards a fully native version...
In the short term, we plan to use [Tauri](https://tauri.app/) which is sort of a hybrid between Electron and a native application. It uses the OS's webview to shrink the shipped binary to only a few megabytes and reuse shared memory resources with other webviews at runtime. It also runs all our Rust code natively instead of through WebAssembly so all the business logic in Graphite runs natively and only the thin UI layer becomes dependent on web tech for the GUI display.
In the long term, we plan to rewrite the entire GUI in [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem) which is the up-and-coming Rust GUI that I believe will finally get everything right, including performance (which is something many desktop GUI frameworks are actually bad it, and sometimes even worse than web). We'll still deploy a web version but at that point, it will become native-first.
Hopefully that roadmap and explanation of the architectural decisions clears up any worries about the short and long term state of our GUI.
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Is it possible to create Android apps using Rust?
That said, Xilem is very close to that idea, but it's in its very early stages and nowhere near Flutter's capabilities.
- Xilem Vector Graphics (Rust meetup talk)
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50 Shades of Rust, or emerging Rust GUIs in a WASM world
xilem#62 demonstrates how Xilem's reactive layer can target DOM nodes.
- GUI development with Rust and GTK 4
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Floem - yet another new Rust native UI library
Inspired by Xilem, Leptos and rui, Floem aims to be a high performance declarative UI library with minimal effort from the user.
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XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox
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)
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What was the hardest coming from C++ to Rust?
Yeah, Druid is being replaced by Xilem, but unfortunately Xilem isn't ready yet. So that whole project's in a bit of an awkward in-between phase where there isn't really any toolkit that can be recommended.
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Druid, a Rust-native UI toolkit, released v0.8 after two years of work by 80 contributors.
Third, we are discontinuing Druid proper. Years of experience has shown that people can struggle with the Druid data architecture and we can do better. This layer will be replaced by a new project called Xilem. We have spent a lot of time thinking about it and this decision was not taken lightly. You can read a more detailed post about the Xilem architecture but the gist of it is that we've found at a way to code UI in Rust that feels a lot more effortless than previous attempts. Xilem will look very intuitive to those familiar with state of the art toolkits such as SwiftUI, Flutter, and React, while at the same time being idiomatic Rust. Also we plan to port as many widgets from Druid to Xilem as possible, which should give the project a reasonable timeline to v0.1. Hopefully later this year.
What are some alternatives?
embedded-graphics - A no_std graphics library for embedded applications
floem - A native Rust UI library with fine-grained reactivity
areweguiyet - A website built for the Rust community
iced - A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm
egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native
leptos - Build fast web applications with Rust.
orbtk - The Rust UI-Toolkit.
slint - Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps.
druid - A data-first Rust-native UI design toolkit.
vizia - A declarative GUI library written in Rust
vgtk - A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and Gtk-rs