wrend VS vite

It’s also callable from JavaScript if you don’t want to have to deal with the Rust toolchain. Checkout this directory if you want to see some copyable examples, including raw html and javascript, which is about the lowest barrier to entry you can get I think: https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend/tree/master/examples

Major props for https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend/tree/master/examples -- having real examples integrated with different build systems really lowers the barrier to start playing around

Hi all! Wrend is a wrapper library around raw WebGL2 code. Its goal is to make working with WebGL/WebGL2 more convenient when writing Rust and/or JavaScript/TypeScript code in the browser. Because of a JavaScript-compatible wrapper API around the raw Rust code, wrend is callable from both Rust AND JavaScript, and it includes a strongly typed TypeScript API. Similarly, it is available for download from both crates.io and npm. I initially started this library out of frustration. I love to do creative coding, but I found myself dedicating more and more time and energy to refactoring bad infrastructure rather than working on new creative projects, so I decided to channel that misspent energy instead into a structured library that would give me the unified organization I was looking for and that I could also share with others. Some highlights: wrend provides safe and easy abstraction over requestAnimationFrame calls, making continuous animations as simple as calling start_animating and then holding the returned handle in memory. Stopping is also as easy as dropping the returned renderer handle and/or calling stop_animating. (When working with JavaScript, it’s as simple as calling free() on the the renderer. Taking canvas screenshots is built in, and so is direct recording of the canvas—something invaluable when doing creative coding and sharing the results. Why WebGL and and not WebGPU? While I’m aware that WebGPU is up-and-coming, and I’m very excited for it, and while it is even possible to write right now in Rust, I’m a web developer first and foremost, and I like to share my creations with lots of people. As soon as WebGPU support is stable in mainstream browsers, I will happily redirect my energies :) Wrend is very work in progress, and it’s actually my first Rust library in general, but I decided it was finally time to share what I’m working on with the world. Code: https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend Live Demo Site: https://austintheriot.github.io/wrend/

Demo: https://austintheriot.github.io/wrend/ray-tracer Code: https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend/tree/master/demos/ray_tracer

I think initially I used their autogenerated templates and other's templates as well, but lately, in my own personal projects, I've started rolling my own Webpack config (v5) with WasmPlugPlugin, which seems to work decently well most of the time. Here's one of my recent frontend crates that is fairly standalone and can be copied if you want a starter template that has been recently updated and has a good chance of compiling / working correctly for you with minimal dependencies: https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend/tree/master/examples/vanilla_rs

Code: https://github.com/austintheriot/wrend/tree/master/demos/game_of_life Demo: https://austintheriot.github.io/wrend/game-of-life

Given our team's collective proficiency within the React ecosystem, we decided to leverage this expertise for our project. Initially, we contemplated utilizing Next.js; however, due to the limited practical experience with this technology among key engineers and the pressing timeline to develop the first prototype, we opted for a Single Page Application(SPA) approach. For bundling, we selected Vite, primarily due to its super fast build times, simplicity of configuration, and potential for a nearly seamless transition to server-side rendering.

We are continuing to add new project templates for various types of projects, and we've recently created one for the infamous combination of React with Vite tooling.

Vite focuses on providing an extremely fast development server and workflow speed in web development. It uses its own ES module imports during development, speeding up the startup time.

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc' import path from 'path' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 3000 }, css: { devSourcemap: true }, resolve: { alias: { '~': path.resolve(__dirname, './src') } } })

I am currently utilizing Vite:

Homepage: https://vitejs.dev/

Without any adding any dependencies you can connect react props to raw css at runtime with nothing but css variables (aka "custom properties"). If you add CSS modules on top you don't have to worry about affecting the global scope so components created in this way can be truly modular and transferrable. I use this with vite.

Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/

it says in their docs that they recommend Vite https://vitejs.dev/

it goes like this.

1. you create a repo folder, you cd into it.

2. you create a client template using vite which can be plain typescript, or uses frameworks such as react or vue, at https://vitejs.dev/guide/

3. you cd in that client directory, you npm install, then you npm run dev, it should show you that it works at localhost:5173

4. you follow the instructions on your url, you do npm install @web3modal/wagmi @wagmi/core @wagmi/connectors viem

5. you follow the further instructions.

> It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what?

you install the wagmi modules, then you import them in your js code, those code can run upon being loaded or upon user actions such as button clicks

> Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

no need for those. browserify is old school way of transpiling commonjs modules into browser-compatible modules. webpack is similar. vite replaces both webpack and browserify. vite also uses esbuild and swc under the hood which replaces babel.

> I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

pretty much similar actually. except on client-side, you have src and dist folders. when you run "npm run build" vite will compile the src dir into dist dir. the outputs are the static files that you can serve with any http server such as npx serve, or caddy, or anything really.

> What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

vite supports both ecmascript modules and commonjs modules. but these days you'll just want to stick with ecmascript which makes your code consistently use import and export syntax, and you get the extra benefit of it working well with your vscode intellisense.

> In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

if people want plain js there is unpkg.com and esm.sh way, but the vite route is the best for you as it's recommended and tested by the providers of your modules.

> And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

I recommend typescript, as it gives you better type-safety and better intellisense, but it really depends. If you're new to it, it can slow you down at first. But as your project grows you'll eventually see the value of it. In vite there are options to scaffold your project in pure js or ts.