taffy VS druid

I maintain a standalone web layout engine[0] (currently implementing Flexbox and CSS Grid) which has no scripting support. WPT layout tests using is a major blocker to us running WPT tests against our library. Yoga (used by React Native) is in a similar position.<p>Do you think the WPT would accept pull requests replacing such tests with equivalent tests that don't use <script> (perhaps using a build script to generate multiple tests instead - or simply writing out the tests longhand)?<p>I could run against only the ref-tests, but if I can't get full coverage then the WPT seems to provide little value over our own test suite.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy">https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy</a>

> Is there any easy to use/hack HTML layouting engine where I could experiment with custom CSS attributes and bridge that gap? Would anything from Servo be suitable?

Servo could be used for this. You'd want to add support for parsing the CSS properties themselves to the style crate in https://github.com/servo/stylo and then the layout implementation to the layout2020 crate in https://github.com/servo/servo. You do effectively get a whole browser though.

I'm currently working on building a lighter weight / hackable layout engine based on a combination of https://github.com/servo/stylo (for css parsing and selector resolution), https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (for box-level layout) and https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (for flow/inline layout). I expect to have something decent in around 6 months

Neither of these setups currently have any support for pagination though.

I maintain a web layout library that is designed to be integrated into other software:

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

It needs to be combined with a text layout engine (such as https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text), and it doesn't support everything yet (notable features that are currently missing: "float", "display: inline-block", "box-sizing: content-box", "position: static"). But we have Block, Flexbox and CSS Grid support with more on the way.

All of these projects have in common that they use Taffy (the project that I work on!) for box-level layout (which currently gives them block, flexbox, and grid layout) , and are either using or planning to use cosmic-text for text/inline layout. This gives you a decent first approximation of web layout, but it's not perfect and there are major features like float, display: inline-block, position: static, box-sizing: content-box missing. Not to mention that none of these implementations currently resolve CSS selectors, so you are effectively limited to inline styles (if you're interested in something in that direction then you may be interested in https://github.com/vizia/vizia).

While there are a lot of Rust UI frameworks, none of them are really recommended for production use yet. I suspect a few of the will die off and work will coalesce a few once things mature a bit.

Another nice feature of the Rust UI ecosystem is that lots of it is being built in a modular way. For example I maintain a layout engine [0] library which just does layout and can be easily integrated by anybody creating a UI library. And there a bunch of similar composable libraries covering rendering, text layout, accessibility, window creation, clipboard access, etc.

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

You might be interested in the combination of Taffy [0] which handles box-level browser layout (block, flexbox, grid, etc) and Cosmic Text [1] which handles text-level layout and basic text editing functionality.

Integrating them into browsers while retaining accessibility could be tricky. But in they're general they're relatively small standalone libraries implementing most of the layout algorithms that browsers implement (although there are currently a few key missing features like laying out "inline-block" items in line with text).

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

[1]: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text

I maintain a library (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy) that implements both Flexbox and CSS Grid, and is designed to be easily embedded (similar to Yoga, which Ink is using).

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (disclaimer: I work on this crate) which does CSS layout given CSS styles. This would probably be much more useful once we merge support for display: block (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy/pull/474), and if in the future we support display: table. Taffy doesn't handle text layout but is designed to integrate nicely with external layout systems.

Ok, "1.4GB" made me look into this more. I hadn't realised that we were using a "superlinter" action that includes linters for over 10 languages. Switching to a different github action brought to time down to 3 seconds! https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy/pull/463

For GUI applications, the story is mixed. There are several GUI frameworks in active development, but nothing as polished and battle-tested as Electron for TypeScript. There are bindings to GTK, but they're cumbersome to work with, and I wouldn't recommend it to a Rust newbie. There's also Tauri, which is a bit like Electron and lets you write the GUI in HTML/CSS/JS and the business logic in Rust.

Concerning GUI frameworks, the most common ones are druid, egui and iced. All three of them run native and on the Web.

Going to give a shoutout to druid. I've recently tried it with the Lapce editor and it's just so smooth, fast and works so well for a pre-alpha app.

As iced and egui were difficult for me, i started with druid.

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Druid should be good for most cases, it has a lot of built-in widget for the UI, you can even make a custom widget with a canvas-alike painting API.

Druid, which is a Rust-native UI toolkit for building desktop applications targeting Windows/macOS/Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, has a new version out - v0.8.

There's a memoize View node in the previous iteration of the Xilem prototype, but it hasn't made it in to the current branch yet. That sounds like what you're asking, but it's possible I'm missing something.

You can use GTK from Rust. But the Rust native ones aren't really there yet. [Iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced) which has been picked up by System76 and [Druid](https://github.com/linebender/druid) (and it's next gen version [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem)) are the ones to watch, along with Dioxus which is the main post here.

I'd expect there to be something useable by the end of 2023.