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makepad
Makepad is a creative software development platform for Rust that compiles to wasm/webGL, osx/metal, windows/dx11 linux/opengl
In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time.
Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects.
Rik Arends[3] was one of the Ajax.org folks and he's been working on a WebGL-based code environment called Makepad[4], which is entirely built in Rust and has its own UI toolkit. He's complained a lot about how difficult it is to make a performant JS-based editing environment.
My point in all of this is just that there are absolutely tradeoffs in performance, accessibility, ease-of-development, internationalization, and likely other aspects. If raw performance is what you're going for, it's hard to beat just drawing on a canvas or using WebGL. Google Docs needs to worry about all of that other stuff, too, so I'll be interested to see how this shapes up.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Skywriter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(editor)
[3]: https://twitter.com/rikarends
[4]: https://makepad.dev
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Perhaps Flutter. It uses Canvas to render in the web.
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Appwrite
Appwrite - The Open Source Firebase alternative introduces iOS support . Appwrite is an open source backend server that helps you build native iOS applications much faster with realtime APIs for authentication, databases, files storage, cloud functions and much more!
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> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.
About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2, nowadays https://treenotation.org/). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental universal notation of the universe, which you can think of as "two-dimensional binary". I predict we will soon see a Cambrian Explosion of new formats and notations that are simpler and more interoperable with each other, and some will have the opportunity to build new great languages for rendering stacks.
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I didn't believe you at first, but then I gave it a try.
Yes, they actually built an email client from which you cannot copy text: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/reply
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Well, to be fair Libre Office online exists[0]. However, I believe EtherCalc[1] is faster.
[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
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I remember Flipboard using canvas to render their UI before using react, which has the same idea, you can look at the repo and their post about it:
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SonarLint
Deliver Cleaner and Safer Code - Right in Your IDE of Choice!. SonarLint is a free and open source IDE extension that identifies and catches bugs and vulnerabilities as you code, directly in the IDE. Install from your favorite IDE marketplace today.
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It seems like WebGPU is the next thing:
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slate
A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. (Currently in beta.) (by ianstormtaylor)
With a canvas-based engine, the editor is no longer relying on the contenteditable spec right?
For the majority of use cases, do you think contenteditable + view layer which precisely updates the HTML is still viable though. Or more specifically, what do you think about libraries like ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net/) or Slate.js (https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate)?
I understand if you have really long documents or spreadsheets (I imagine latter is more frequent), you could maybe solve performance rendering problems with virtualization, which canvas gives more flexibility to?
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With a canvas-based engine, the editor is no longer relying on the contenteditable spec right?
For the majority of use cases, do you think contenteditable + view layer which precisely updates the HTML is still viable though. Or more specifically, what do you think about libraries like ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net/) or Slate.js (https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate)?
I understand if you have really long documents or spreadsheets (I imagine latter is more frequent), you could maybe solve performance rendering problems with virtualization, which canvas gives more flexibility to?
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Sorry, I should have clarified a bit more — I'm writing a cross-platform desktop application that has a preact[0] frontend (+ a Go backend) using `firefox --app application.ini`.
I have been experimenting with performant lists (which is why I brought up the XUL tree), though at the moment, I'm only using the XUL menubar element in order to populate the native macOS menubar.
I am a fullstack web dev in my day job, so my goal here is to write a fast, easily extendable UI that I can quickly iterate upon using modern html/js/css/etc.
Basically, since I love gecko and used to write XUL add-ons many years ago (I'm already familiar with the internal browser architecture, etc.), I'm using XULRunner (`firefox --app application.ini`, as previously mentioned) as a replacement for Electron.
I'm basically using XULRunner in the same way spotify uses the Chromium Embedded Framework[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
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