vello VS blitz

I'm looking forward to doing careful benchmarking, as this renderer absolutely looks like it will be competitive. It turns out that is really hard to do, if you want meaningful results.

My initial take is that performance will be pretty dependent on hardware, in particular support for pixel local storage[1]. From what I've seen so far, Apple Silicon is the sweet spot, as there is hardware support for binning and sorting to tiles, and then asking for fragment shader execution to be serialized within a tile works well. On other hardware, I expect the cost of serializing those invocations to be much higher.

One reason we haven't done deep benchmarking on the Vello side is that our performance story is far from done. We know one current issue is the use of device atomics for aggregating bounding boxes. We have a prototype implementation [2] that uses monoids for segmented reduction. Additionally, we plan to do f16 math (which should be a major win especially on mobile), as well as using subgroups for various prefix sum steps (subgroups are in the process of landing in WebGPU[3]).

Overall, I'm thrilled to see this released as open source, and that there's so much activity in fast GPU vector graphics rendering. I'd love to see a future in which CPU path rendering is seen as being behind the times, and this moves us closer to that future.

[1]: https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/docs/da...

[2]: https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/259

[3]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4306

Dioxus is working on this with blitz. It's leveraging wgpu through the linebender group's Vello renderer. Still in early stages.

If you're doing advanced compute work (including lock-free data structures), then it's best effort.

https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/42 is an issue from when Vello (then piet-gpu) had a single-pass prefix sum algorithm. Looking back, I'm fairly confident that it's a shader translation issue and that it wouldn't work with MoltenVK either, but we stopped investigating when we moved to a more robustly portable approach.

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)

blessed.rs lists these three crates for 2D drawing: - https://lib.rs/crates/femtovg - https://lib.rs/crates/skia-safe - https://github.com/linebender/vello

Vello (https://github.com/linebender/vello) which uses wgpu to render Edit: just saw you require images. Vello doesn't support those yet

How does this relate to Vello? Both target raw-window-handle for winit compatibility. Vello uses WGPU vs piet-glow using GL.

Finally, maybe vello could help you with ideas. It's not production ready yet, but they have some interesting ideas for 2D rendering using wgpu.

Have you talked to the Dioxus people recently?

They're working on a project called Dioxus Blitz; from what I'm told, they're trying to implement a minimal browser target, that provides some basic DOM-like features and renders with wgpu.

It's not exactly what you're hoping for, but you might find common ground.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

(Also, the Linebender project is working on Masonry, with FFI as a medium-term goal.)

Your proposal sounds very similar to what the Dioxus folks are doing on Blitz, which is using HTML/CSS as the languages but doing native rendering. WebF seems much further along, and I know they've been exploring other rendering engines, so it may be an interesting conversation for you to have with them.

Others have already mentioned inlyne and blitz, however given that you're interested in combining web UI with game/wgpu rendering you may be more interested in bevy_ui (and the higher level APIs like bevy_ui_dsl and belly that sit on top of this). Bevy UI is working on a HTML model and is specifically designed to integrate with Bevy's main game renderer and other infrastructure. It's worth noting that a 0.11 release of Bevy of due in next few days, and that UI is going to be a strong focus of the 0.12 release cycle: which should lead to significant development of bevy_ui, and either a doubling down on the "HTML-like UI" approach or a pivot to a new approach.

Here is an example: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/master/examples/buttons.rs

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

You may also be interested in https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz which aims to be a full HTML+CSS renderer on top of wgpu (but is currently not nearly as complete as inlyne).

If you are focused on performance we are working on a native renderer for Dioxus called Blitz. It is very incomplete right now, but in the future it will be much more performant than the current webview based approach.

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.

The main desktop renderer for Dioxus uses wry (the webview tauri uses internally), so the startup time will likely be similar. We are working on a native renderer called blitz which should improve this, but development is still early