← Back to context

Comment by goku12

5 days ago

> (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout)

This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.

39 comments

goku12

Reply
nicoburns  5 days ago

> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine

It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competitor on top of it) and NLnet (who are a non-profit interested in the alternative web browser use case).

We're trying to really push on the modular side of things to create a web engine that's flexible / hackable and can be moulded for a variety of use cases.

We'd love more contributors, so if anyone is interested in getting involved then drop by our GitHub (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/) or Discord (https://discord.gg/AnNPqT95pu - #native channel)

  • goku12  5 days ago

    You have my admiration and support for this work! I guess it goes without saying how monumental and critical the work on alternative engines like servo and libweb are. We are genuinely tired of the current duopoly (I'm starting to lose hope with Firefox and gecko as well. They seem to have priorities different to our expectations.) But I guess we now have one more to look forward to, thanks to you and the rest of the team! Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available. Regards!

    • nicoburns  4 days ago

      > You have my admiration and support for this work!

      Thanks!

      > Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available.

      Amazing - maybe see you around :)

  • dingi  5 days ago

    Just skimmed through the Blitz source. Really interesting. I don’t have experience with UI rendering or Rust, but I couldn’t help wondering: if you leave out things like local storage and websockets, why include networking at all? Feels like a separate concern. Genuinely curious. Great project. Wishing you all the best!

    • nicoburns  5 days ago

      We do have the networking abstracted behind a trait (so people can bring their own implementation if they want), but we need something for testing (and it's convenient for users if we provide a default option for them too). I would also note that our networking support is a pretty thin layer (~200 LoC) around the https://docs.rs/reqwest/ crate. As well as HTTP, reqwest is handling things like cookies and form encoding for us.

  • jraph  4 days ago

    > or Discord

    Oh, no, why do alternative web browser engine devs love Discord so much? The Ladybird project also does this… that's certainly a barrier to entry for would be contributors attached to free software and software freedom… It's a shame, I suspect the intersection between people like this and people interested in alternative web browser engines is not small (comparatively speaking)…

    Anyway, it's nice to see alternative web browser engines appearing like this. We need browser tech that does not rely on Big Ad funding. Even better if they cooperate on some common libraries like this.

    Thanks for working on such things.

    Web browser engines have always interested me, I might one day jump in.

echelon  5 days ago

Questions for the Rust UX experts:

Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron?

I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, which precludes Tauri/Electron (something I'm currently using and unhappy about), but I also want to (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets, and (4) have it look nice and modern.

Javascript/browser-oriented frameworks make requirements 2-4 easy, and it has the side benefit of also making hiring easy (not a requirement per se). But the results feel so bloated and anti-Desktop/native. It gobbles up RAM and renders slowly, even when best practices are used. It's the very definition of a double-edged sword.

Are these four requirements simply impossible to satisfy together for native Rust UX toolkits right now?

Rust's egui looks amazing, but I doubt you'd be able to build a very complicated UX with it. Or if you could, it might take you half a year to deliver.

Iced also looks cool, but looks less featureful.

Are there any "non-browser" Rust UX toolkits that aren't dated GTK/KDE frameworks, but that can build graphically-oriented (not just text/button widget) programs?

If I were building a "slimmed down photoshop", are there any Rust GUI toolkits to reach for? Or if I were incorporating a Bevy or 3D render pane?

  • jpc0  5 days ago

    > I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, … (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets … (4) have it look nice and modern.

    Find me when you find this, because I actually think it is impossible.

    I think there is fundamentally too much inherent complexity to abstract away to keep 2 and not sacrifice 1. Specifically for something properly cross platform.

    If you are only targeting MacOS or windows then I think it’s absolutely possible but then you are using the wrong language, nothing against rust at all on that, the platform defaults are just swift / C# for those use cases.

    And I’m not sure but unless you are just using a gtk/Qt style framework you would absolutely run into a11y problems that you would need to build around yourself.

    Sounds like you probably want egui though… if your primary UI is a big canvas that needs to be hardware accelerated and interaction is just to assist that use case egui is probably a good bet for you. But you wouldn’t be hiring web devs to do that.

    • cosmic_cheese  5 days ago

      I believe it’s possible, but it’s going to take a little bit of outside of the box thinking in that it’d be most practical if the UI toolkit isn’t bound strictly to a single paradigm.

      Both imperative and declarative UIs have serious problems. Imperative toolkits can get hairy with their boilerplate and can make staying in sync with data state a real challenge, while declarative toolkits have a strong tendency towards rigidity that makes for awkward DX and ugly code in all but the simplest todo app kind of examples and don’t lend themselves to fine grained control.

      I think there’s a happy medium to be found between the two in a well-designed hybrid. This hypothetical framework would allow full declarative in situations where that’s highly suitable, but would also allow the dev to do widget configuration in a more traditional imperative style or if necessary fall back to full imperative. Support for reactivity on both sides of the coin would be robust so staying in lockstep with data is simplified.

      This would bring down boilerplate substantially since the broader layout of most screens could be done declaratively, but it wouldn’t come at the cost of more advanced functionality, flexibility, and developer control on the individual widget level.

      I’d like to dig further into these ideas at some point if I get time.

      2 replies →

  • rollcat  5 days ago

    I'm no UX expert, but I regularly try out new (and old) toolkits to understand the problem space.

    It really sounds like you want an immediate mode toolkit. Retained mode will never be "super-snappy", there's an entire sandwich between your code and the pixels. Look at Blender or Reaper, this is the kind of "feel" you'd be getting.

    If you want retained mode + "true" native widgets on all platforms, investigate: Toga (Python), WxWidgets (C++), and Tk (Tcl). The native toolkits are often best in class on each platform, and these wrappers are about as thin as they can reasonably get (e.g. Toga uses pyobjc). Integration with Rust is left as an exercise to the reader ;)

    A rich widget library is nice, but consider the depth as well. Egui went to great lengths to integrate assistive technologies, which depending on your target audience may be impactful. (Also: accessibility is for everyone. https://shortcat.app/)

    If you want easy hiring, you have to go with mainstream. We've +/- named all of the options by now. Otherwise, hire a talent who's worked on the next closest thing to what you're building, and trust them to decide the direction.

    Looks and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. There are many apps that have a distinct, sometimes quirky, but appreciable style. Reaper looks out of place on every platform, but I prefer it over Logic or Ableton.

  • airstrike  5 days ago

    I'm super biased in favor of iced.

    Yes, there are missing features (it's not even version 1.0 yet!) but I think the number is very small now and the solution is usually to fill in the gaps yourself—which is possible because iced is totally modular

    I've made a spreadsheet editor and a slideshow editor with it so "slimmed down photoshop" seems feasible although admittedly you will likely need to get deep into the renderer (possibly write your own renderer traits and there), but I suppose you're comfortable with that given your goal.

    If you're not allergic to Discord, come join us. It's a helpful, awesome tight community IMHO

    Link for the lazy: https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd

    Project link: https://iced.rs

    • Macha  5 days ago

      No support for RTL or CJK text, IMEs, or accessibility tools leaves it pretty firmly in the "toy" category for me for now, sadly.

      This isn't meant to bash on the project specifically, basically the only tools that meet that criteria are platform native UIs, the web stack (including Electron), Qt and Flutter.

      AccessKit is promising to change that but I haven't checked in a while how it's going. I did see GTK looking into it as a cross platform option as GTK's accessibility support only works on the Linux desktop currently

      4 replies →

  • dceddia  5 days ago

    I know it’s usually taken as a given around here that Electron is slow, and many of the big-name apps using it are cited as examples with good reason.

    From working on a Tauri app myself for a few years (video editor) I just think the blame is misattributed. These things are not inherently slow. Slower than native? Maybe, probably, at the level of milliseconds. Visibly laggy? No, that’s the badly-written UI code’s fault. (see also: the latest iterations of the macOS System Settings UI, where the search box lags like crazy)

    A webview can be extremely responsive. It won’t be if you treat it like a web page (where clicking buttons fires off HTTP requests) or if you let the JS framework code get out of hand, but those are not the fault of the wrapper.

    If you like building with HTML/CSS/JS then I’d recommend doing some perf experiments to see how far these tools can take you. Of course if you don’t want to use that stack then pick something else :)

    If you’re building photoshop, the main UI will probably be canvas anyway, where drawing is fully under your control, no matter which framework you go with. That stuff can be very fast or very not-fast depending on how the code is written.

  • usrusr  5 days ago

    Makepad is neither gtk generation nor browser based. Might check the "just text/button widget" box though, I'd certainly place it on the minimalistic end of the spectrum. (haven't worked with makepad, just enjoyed the demo)

  • nicoburns  5 days ago

    > Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron?

    For now it's largely the same. Both Dioxus and Leptos render using Tauri (or a web browser). For Dioxus, a Blitz-based renderer (Dioxus Native ) is in development which will change the story slightly.

    I would suggest Iced if you're looking for efficient (I don't think it's any less featureful than any other Rust-based GUI). With honourable mentions for Slint and Vizia.