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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.
First, at the deepest level, we are moving away from Piet, which is a cross-platform 2D graphics abstraction. Under the hood it uses whatever the standard OS API is. Instead we will be using Vello which we have been building as a research project for years already. It is starting to near its v0.1, which is very exciting. Fundamentally it is a novel GPU accelerated 2D rendering engine with a strong focus on performance. It is not ready for benchmarks yet, but we're confident it will deliver. If you're curious, you can check out the Vello roadmap for 2023.
First, at the deepest level, we are moving away from Piet, which is a cross-platform 2D graphics abstraction. Under the hood it uses whatever the standard OS API is. Instead we will be using Vello which we have been building as a research project for years already. It is starting to near its v0.1, which is very exciting. Fundamentally it is a novel GPU accelerated 2D rendering engine with a strong focus on performance. It is not ready for benchmarks yet, but we're confident it will deliver. If you're curious, you can check out the Vello roadmap for 2023.
Second, we are taking druid-shell from Druid and making it more generally applicable. It is now called Glazier and its v0.1 is planned for 2023. Compared to its ancestor druid-shell, Glazier no longer depends on Piet and is much more agnostic towards the rendering engine, although our primary focus is on integration with Vello. Overall you can think of Glazier as an alternative to winit with a somewhat different set of goals, e.g. more focus on apps instead of games, and support for more OS features beyond windows.
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.
That sounds quite similar to Tauri’s Tao, so a brief comparison could come in handy.
The architecture is much better layered than Druid, so if you wanted to build a Sycamore-style reactive layer to drive the widget tree, skipping the Xilem View layer altogether, you can. In fact, I encourage experiments like this, and they're not necessarily blocking on Xilem progress, as you could learn a lot by doing it on top of masonry.