termbench VS accesskit

"Seems smooth to me" is a thing people constantly say, at this point I just assume everyone's blind to lag. I'll wait for the benchmarks.

> (4) Casey sits down and writes termbench, to illustrate his point (https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench); it is indeed orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal, and proves his point decisively.

This is actually pretty interesting. Is there something similar specifically for linux?

I just ran a quick test using Casey Muratori's termbench (https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench) you are an order of magnitude slower than Alacritty, and also significantly slower than iTerm. Warp also locks up pretty severely and only shows a new frame once every few seconds during most of the run.

Alacritty

> Am I the only one who really enjoys Windows 11 so far?

Probably not, but consider that people have a lot of different use cases for their computer and a lot of different priorities and Microsoft has been pretty consistent lately about ignoring pretty much any of them that aren't "I really wish my desktop were a clunky tablet".

> I really like the new UI which feels more modern and harmonic

Subjective, but feeling more modern is precisely the opposite of what I want in a UI. Modern means slow and cumbersome with lots of wasted space, sparse options, and unreadable widgets.

> Control Panel is still in there somewhere but why should I care?

Control Panel had nothing wrong with it and probably still has settings options that are missing from the new ones?

> new GPU accelerated Terminal is really nice

It's performance is remarkably terrible for something that's GPU accelerated. Casey Muratori has said a lot about it. https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench and https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm were a result. It doesn't mean a lot in terms of quality of Windows 11, I just think it is a good illustration of modern Windows team's development practices.

> Does it have tons of telemetry, cruft from 20 years in the kernel and some rough edges?

Cruft is fine because it is there for backwards compat, which is huge for a tone of desktop use cases. Linux Kernel has a ton of cruft too for the same reason. Telemetry is bullshit and wastes my computer's resources to effectively spy on me.

> Is the hardware requirements a bit ridiculous?

The hardware requirements are very ridiculous. Windows 11 is not revolutionary, but somehow manages to require twice the minimum specs of ten in some metrics, and a TPM module.

> To each their own I guess but it sometimes feels a bit depressing how HN crowd trashes every OS.

They all have problems, big problems, so they all deserve it. I find it more remarkable that people consistently try to say that everything is actually ok!

> Is everyone here still using C64, Windows 2000 or OS9 because it „was the last good system“?

God I wish they were still viable.

Not just Windows. While this is specifically about Windows, you can view this as at least a baseline for terminals: thousands of fps are within reach. If you're barely reaching a few dozen, or less, you're doing something wrong.

See also his benchmark for terminals: https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench

When looking into the issue further, he made a benchmark for the terminal: termbench. On the issue he made, him and a couple others found that the Windows Terminal was spending a large amount of time parsing VT codes. A fair bit of this bottleneck was due to std::string and std::vector resizing.

If you were to implement this yourself, i'd look into either swash or cosmic-text for the text rendering stack (this is one of the things you really don't want to write from the ground up). For accessibility, AccessKit has quickly become the standard for communicating with crossplatform accessibility APIs in rust GUI. lightningcss (or its lower level counterpart cssparser) are both decent options for CSS parsing. Taffy handles some of what browsers offer for a layout engine, but is still being worked on.

> Fleet relies on the Java AWT/Swing framework to get a window from an operating system, but it doesn’t use the Java platform for managing its GUI components besides one JFrame and JPanel on top of it.

This is a terrible decision that is going to bite them in the long run. Doing things this way makes it far, far more difficult to implement accessibility, and regulations on this are only going to get stricter.

Implementing accessibility for a framework like that would involve three separate implementations for three separate platforms and the need to interface with D-Bus, COM and Objective C, from Java. I imagine that the latter two would be particularly difficult, considering how bad Java's FFI support is. It's not just calling methods either, you'd actually need to implement your own classes that conform to the relevant COM interfaces / Objective C protocols. There are libraries that can help with this[1], but I don't think they would work particularly well for something as complex as a code editor.

[1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

fltk-accesskit is an accesskit integration crate for fltk-rs, the gui crate. It's implemented as an external crate to allow for more experimentation before stabilizing the api, especially since fltk is at version 1.4.

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

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)

Using HarfBuzz makes sense. But if you're looking for a pure-Rust alternative, I hear cosmic-text (made by Pop!_OS) is good. There's also AccessKit for accessibility.

There are efforts to support a cross platform accessibility library:

https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

egui is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust, and I just released 0.20. It's a big release!

There is now support for AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) which brings accessibility to egui (a first for an immediate mode GUI?).

There is also better table support, nicer keyboard shortcut handling, better looking text in light mode (still not great, but better).

See more in the changelog: https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Try it out at www.egui.rs