Suave.IO VS freya

This is cool. I just want to give a shoutout to Suave, which is the original inspiration for Giraffe, and is still my go-to web server in F#.

This shouldn't be that hard, I just needed a server that well... served the HTML/CSS/JS files right? I went to my desktop, created an F# script added a couple of libraries like Suave and CliWrap so I could call the dotnet fable command from my F# code and make it compile my Fable files.

Giraffe is a library that sits atop ASP.NET Core and allows developers to build web applications in a functional style; dotnet new giraffe is literally my starting point when I begin a new web application project. (Rather than write three more sentences filled with effusive praise, I’ll just leave it at that; it’s great.) It also provides a view engine (that builds upon Suave‘s “experimental” view engine) which uses an F# DSL to define HTML in a strongly-typed way. It has been incredibly efficient for a while, but with .NET’s work over the past two releases at improving performance, and Giraffe’s adoption of those techniques, it is lightning fast.

Awesome, when it's properly release I'll give it a try with freya (https://github.com/marc2332/freya, a skia-based renderer for Dioxus I am making)

Or if you don't care about web compatibility, you can use Dioxus' state management with Freya which is more complete and renderers natively with Skia

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)

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus (which has native rendering in the form of https://github.com/marc2332/freya)

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.

Freya

A native GUI library https://github.com/marc2332/freya

Since you’re working with Taffy and Skia, have you checked out Freya? There’s more room for innovation in the more tightly scoped niches of this kind.

Marc has also made some really good progress on a skia renderer but I don't think it is ready for production yet.