xilem VS druid

The web browser gives us an extremely frictionless development and deployment process. Our CI generates a fully deploy at a unique link for every commit which lets us open and test PRs with a single click. It deploys updates to users without needing to make them go through an updater. In these relatively early stages of our development process, the importance of the velocity that gives us cannot be understated. Plus, the ability for users to try it out in one second is quite helpful.

I've designed the whole architecture specifically to avoid the web UI "feeling like a web app" with the subtle latency of interacting with the site. I wrote all-custom UI components using the minimal amount of HTML and CSS to achieve the requirements instead of depending on an external component framework which always loves nesting dozens of `div`s inside each other to achieve what should be doable in one or two. And our highly-lightweight JS which calls into Rust (Wasm) lets it keep the slow logic out of slow JS. And we are using Svelte to move most of the frontend DOM management logic from runtime to compile time. This architecture really helps us keep performance levels as close as possible to feeling native despite using the web for its GUI rendering; and I believe it has succeeded at feeling responsive by comparison to most other web apps you use (even Slack, for example, which shouldn't be nearly as complex).

Web lets us build fast, deploy the latest version to users fast, leverage prevalent developer experience with HTML/CSS for creating GUIs, and avoid getting stuck in a box with Rust's currently-immature GUI ecosystem. That's the tradeoff we had to make early on, and it was a good decision. But we will eventually move towards a fully native version...

In the short term, we plan to use [Tauri](https://tauri.app/) which is sort of a hybrid between Electron and a native application. It uses the OS's webview to shrink the shipped binary to only a few megabytes and reuse shared memory resources with other webviews at runtime. It also runs all our Rust code natively instead of through WebAssembly so all the business logic in Graphite runs natively and only the thin UI layer becomes dependent on web tech for the GUI display.

In the long term, we plan to rewrite the entire GUI in [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem) which is the up-and-coming Rust GUI that I believe will finally get everything right, including performance (which is something many desktop GUI frameworks are actually bad it, and sometimes even worse than web). We'll still deploy a web version but at that point, it will become native-first.

Hopefully that roadmap and explanation of the architectural decisions clears up any worries about the short and long term state of our GUI.

That said, Xilem is very close to that idea, but it's in its very early stages and nowhere near Flutter's capabilities.

xilem#62 demonstrates how Xilem's reactive layer can target DOM nodes.

Inspired by Xilem, Leptos and rui, Floem aims to be a high performance declarative UI library with minimal effort from the user.

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)

Yeah, Druid is being replaced by Xilem, but unfortunately Xilem isn't ready yet. So that whole project's in a bit of an awkward in-between phase where there isn't really any toolkit that can be recommended.

Third, we are discontinuing Druid proper. Years of experience has shown that people can struggle with the Druid data architecture and we can do better. This layer will be replaced by a new project called Xilem. We have spent a lot of time thinking about it and this decision was not taken lightly. You can read a more detailed post about the Xilem architecture but the gist of it is that we've found at a way to code UI in Rust that feels a lot more effortless than previous attempts. Xilem will look very intuitive to those familiar with state of the art toolkits such as SwiftUI, Flutter, and React, while at the same time being idiomatic Rust. Also we plan to port as many widgets from Druid to Xilem as possible, which should give the project a reasonable timeline to v0.1. Hopefully later this year.

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.