winit VS tokio

Hi! I’m Aloke, an engineer at Warp.

I’m really excited to share that Warp is now available on Linux! If you’re interested in trying it out, you can download Warp: https://warp.dev/

Building Warp on Linux was quite an undertaking. Warp uses a custom Rust-based UI framework that we built in house and renders natively on the GPU. To get Warp running on Linux, we built a version of our UI framework that supports winit [1] as a windowing backend. We also built a version of our renderer that uses wgpu [2]. Reducing complexity by using these well-supported, cross platform, frameworks let us bootstrap a version of Linux quicker than expected and should make it easier to build Warp for other platforms (like Windows).

Please let me know what you think! Happy to answer any questions, either about the product or about technical challenges.

[1] https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

This link: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit has this code:

Have you seen the official example?

That's a bit shortsighted given that there is an active discussion about reducing the interior mutability.

I really need a file dialog for my ImGui-based project in Rust. I tried using this crate but it's wayyyyyyy too old. I also saw this but considering the date it was last updated and the look of the repo, it's not gonna work either. Also I maintain my own library for such things, but it's currently blocked by this issue. What options do I have?

In this case, I used the "A"GPL because this crate could feasibly run on the web. winit has a web backend. At the moment I don't support it (there's a PR that needs to land first), but in the near future it's not implausible that this crate could be used in a web environment.

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)

Name: Francesca! Location: Portland, OR (UTC-7) Looking for: Remote only, full-time or contract. Contact: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-lovebloom/ GitHub: https://github.com/francesca64 Experience: 4+ years of professional Rust experience; former lead maintainer of winit and creator of cargo-mobile.

Window manager: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

Being able to control nondeterminism is particularly useful for testing and debugging. This allows creating reproducible test environments, as well as discrete-event simulation for faster-than-real-time simulation of time delays. For example, Cardano uses a simulation environment for the IO monad that closely follows core Haskell packages; Sui has a simulator based on madsim that provides an API-compatible replacement for the Tokio runtime and intercepts various POSIX API calls in order to enforce determinism. Both allow running the same code in production as in the simulator for testing.

tokio / hyper / toml / serde / serde_json / json5 / console

tokio - An asynchronous runtime for Rust

3. Tokio

The AWS SDK makes use of the async capabilities in the Tokio library. So when you see async in front of a fn that function is capable of executing asynchronously.

Petar is also looking at implementing concurrency the way it is in Go to have a fully functional virtual machine as it is in the spec. This would likely attract more external contributors to developing the VM. One advantage of Rust is that, with the concurrency model, there is already an extensive library called Tokio which he can use. Petar stresses that this isn’t easy, but he believes it’s achievable, at least as a research topic around determinism and concurrency.

Another thing to point out is that async is a thing in Rust. I'm not going to begin to dive into this paradigm in this article, but know it's handled by the awesome Tokio framework.

So I started by using Tokio, a popular async runtime. The docs and samples helped me get a simple outbound TCP connection working. The Rust async book also had a lot of good explanations, both practical and digging into the details of what a runtime does.

Regarding the quote:

> The Original Sin of Rust async programming is making it multi-threaded by default. If premature optimization is the root of all evil, this is the mother of all premature optimizations, and it curses all your code with the unholy Send + 'static, or worse yet Send + Sync + 'static, which just kills all the joy of actually writing Rust.

Agree about the melodramatic tone. I also don't think removing the Send + Sync really makes that big a difference. It's the 'static that bothers me the most. I want scoped concurrency. Something like <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/2596>.

Another thing I really hate about Rust async right now is the poor instrumentation. I'm having a production problem at work right now in which some tasks just get stuck. I wish I could do the equivalent of `gdb; thread apply all bt`. Looking forward to <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/5638> landing at least. It exists right now but is experimental and in my experience sometimes panics. I'm actually writing a PR today to at least use the experimental version on SIGTERM to see what's going on, on the theory that if it crashes oh well, we're shutting down anyway.

Neither of these complaints would be addressed by taking away work stealing. In fact, I could keep doing down my list, and taking away work stealing wouldn't really help with much of anything.

The PHP <-> Rust bindings are provided by https://github.com/Nicelocal/ext-php-rs/ (our fork of https://github.com/davidcole1340/ext-php-rs with a bunch of UX improvements :).

php-tokio's integrates the https://revolt.run event loop with the https://tokio.rs event loop; async functionality is provided by the two event loops, in combination with PHP fibers through revolt's suspension API (I could've directly used the PHP Fiber API to provide coroutine suspension, but it was a tad easier with revolt's suspension API (https://revolt.run/fibers), since it also handles the base case of suspension in the main fiber).