I build a Mastodon client with Dioxus last year [1] and it was in general a good experience, but it was also clear that lots of things were still missing (I mean, it was also at version 0.2 when I started working on it).
With these 0.5 changes the Dioxus authors remove almost all the complexities that I ran into when working on Ebou. I haven't played around with it yet, but the removal of lifetimes and constant cloning will make it a much more pleasant experience. I'm looking forward to trying it out, congratulations to the team for such an awesome release!
There are about a dozen Rust frameworks [1] that are trying to do the "native, reactive UI" you can deploy on desktop, web/wasm, mobile, etc. I'm worried about betting on the wrong horse and being stuck maintaining abandonware or being faced with a painful and pointless migration.
In a similar evolutionary race, there were dozens of Rust HTTP server frameworks. Now Axum, Actix, and Rocket appear to have the lead. I'm worried I made the wrong choice as the community momentum appears to be shifting to Axum.
Is there any indication Dioxus will win? It looks to have a large community, venture backing [2] (a good sign!), and more momentum than some of the others. I'd like to use one of these frameworks now, but I worry it's too early to place a bet. Are there any good indicators that now is a good time to start using it?
Are Leptos and Yew the other top contenders? These are the two names I hear the most, apart from Dioxus. What would make them a better (or worse) choice?
My company is heavily invested in Rust, Actix, and Bevy. We're looking at pairing Bevy with Dioxus or a similar framework to deliver native desktop and mobile clients in the future. I just want to make the right choice.
Also, stupid question: is Dioxus named after the Pokemon [3]? The logo makes me think there's something to that, but there are no Pokemon references in the codebase.
Yew has had about 10 commits in the past 6 months and the original creator has since moved on.
Leptos is a good solution for web-app type stuff, but IMO there's a big usability gap. I'll let the community be the judge there, but I wrote up some differences here: https://github.com/dioxusLabs/dioxus/?tab=readme-ov-file#dio... Leptos was fortunate enough to receive a lot of attention from youtubers on its launch.
The most important thing here: we raised venture money for Dioxus. We have many years of runway, are pretty lean, and exclusively focused on pouring resources into making the best GUI library for Rust (and potentially branching out to Python/JS). Getting into YC isn't easy, raising money isn't easy, and there's currently no other Rust projects with similar goals, talent, and financial backing. Biased of course.
Oh, and we're committed to the bevy integration. bevy_dioxus is already updated for 0.5 and we share corporate sponsors with the bevy folks.
Final point, legally, no we're not inspired by any pokemon with a similar sounding name. Even though that pokemon is awesome.
Venture doesn't necessarily mean bad. Long term the goal the goal is to dissolve the gates to Apple and Google's walled gardens, which I personally believe is a net good.
As much is the idealist in me wants to do that with no venture backing, the realist in me knows we need Dioxus to be self sustaining and providing legitimate value for people to switch. Google spends 76 million dollars a year on catering alone - there's no way you can compete with Android and Flutter without huge resources.
Apple and Google capture the value for their platforms via fees and lock-in. Our goal is to capture value by providing really good utilities for building and deploying apps. You can't move heaven and earth without a really big lever, and venture gives us more leverage.
Yes, we're looking at something like a Vercel/Expo model, probably built on Fly, Cloudflare, or AWS, but designed to be self hosted.
We've got a decent amount of enterprise adoption and I think there's money to be made by selling something like a self-hosted Vercel. TBD on licensing - I'd want it to be open source but we wouldn't want people reselling our deploy platform.
We raised a seed to prove that people want to build with dioxus. If that hypotheses is validated, then we invest in the deploy model. If not, we have OSS grants and corporate sponsors that will keep the project alive for years even if the VC money runs out.
I'm not super interested in making money at the hobbyist tier - those developers are our evangelists. Enterprise self hosting is likely harder but I think we can provide a lot of value to teams building apps in large companies.
As a former Expo employee and someone who took a run at this space (moxie) before running out of steam, it’s really exciting to hear this is the approach you’re taking! I’ll be keeping an eye out :).
Cool stuff man, wishing you and the team all the best as a person who quite often uses Flutter for side projects but isn't a big fan of Dart. Any ETA on it being stable/1.0?
Stable/1.0 is always tough to call, and you can't predict the future of course, but it does seem obvious that enterprise value 1.0 software. It's more likely that we 1.0 different pieces of the stack (core, rsx!, html) so the ecosystem can build on top of stable primitives. We probably couldn't 1.0 the renderers themselves for a while.
It's probably another year of iteration until I feel like we're 100% stable, but my penchant for another rewrite is at an all time low.
Flutter is written in Dart but renders to a canvas on the web making it a very, very poor choice for web apps. Especially backend/fullstack apps. Plus you can't use tailwind or whatever flavor of css library there is today. Flutter just nailed the "get up and running" part which we've got as well: `cargo binstall dioxus-cli`, `dx new`, `dx bundle` is literally less than 30 seconds. Hopefully `dx deploy` coming soon.
Electron is... it's electron. A whole chromium instance, an IPC bridge between your frontend and the system, NodeJS, etc. If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb. You can easily deploy them on an embedded/low end device. We're hoping to eat some market share in the embedded-ish land (not true embedded, but like industrial or POS).
Dioxus also has mobile and desktop compatible server functions which basically no other projects have. Expo has been kinda exploring this space. One of our examples is deploying your own LLM on your own infrastructure with a dioxus mobile app UI and it fits in a single file and builds in under a minute.
Thanks, wasn't aware of Expo, though it seems to only do mobile+web apps but not desktop apps?
> If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb.
I'm aware of this from familiarity with Tauri, but hearing it again still amazes me. Very cool.
I have an app in mind I want to build, and really would like to have standalone versions on Android+iOS+Linux+Mac+Windows, plus a web app. But there's no way I can manage all that as a single developer. And the fact no development tool has really nailed this yet is telling how hard it is. Whoever really gets this right will save a ton of developer hours across the industry, and that's valuable. Good luck, hope you guys pull it off!
PS - one feature request: a local/offline-first mode that eases development of apps that work even with poor or no internet connection. Basically I want to build something like Obsidian that is multi-platform, and does all processing and data storage locally first, in an accessible format like SQLLite or flat files, then syncs with the cloud when available, all with as few developer resources as possible. A tool that enables that would be amazing.
Yeah, it's becoming more common in my group of SWEs to specifically opt to NOT use VC backed software. Everyone has stories about companies closing shop and projects failing to continue onward.
Why would Dioxus be any different? If VC's cared about tearing down walled gardens of Google and Apple, why not explicitly donate the money instead? Why have strings attached at all?
For a GUI based project, I'd actually prefer they were VC and/or corporate backed with clear governance.
OSS backend libraries are easily forked, and someone is usually willing to hack on a database library, but GUIs tend to be boring to work on, and designers don't tend to have to the same gumption to work for free that developers do.
We have grants and corporate sponsors to keep the project alive even if the VC money runs out. This was all a side project for me at first, so I went down the "donation" route in the beginning.
Donations are great but they're not how the system works, unfortunately. Dioxus could never compete with the two most valuable companies on earth if it wasn't a self-sustaining business. VC just lets me scale the team from 2 people to 10(?) and have some cash to iterate. We were "profitable" even before taking venture money.
Now we're able to take on more moonshot-type projects like the blitz renderer, a deploy platform, UI fuzz tooling, and more. We're using our seed round exclusively to make dioxus as awesome as possible, so even if it doesn't work out at a venture level, there's still a really cool, polished, end-to-end app framework that you can build and ship with in Rust.
Just for me personally, I don't see the financialization of open source software as an intrinsic good thing and I reflect my technology choices to support this when applicable.
Funding by VC and funding by corps sponsors are 2 very different things. Check how linux desktop projects such as Gnome & KDE kept the lights on for >20 years without VC funding.
> Funding by VC and funding by corps sponsors are 2 very different things
Ok, if you find corp which will give you funding for your project without any expectations, then it is a win. But I am not sure how often this happens.
There are expectations of course, but the ones from a corp will be different from a VC. Typically the corp will expect you to build something they need and can use, a VC will only want financial return on investment.
Enterprise extensions means the cursed land of open core and refusing to have features in the open source version, or a heavy SaaS push combined with a possible license change along the road, and these are the primary reasons to avoid VC-backed "open source for now".
> Enterprise extensions means the cursed land of open core and refusing to have features in the open source version
yes, there are risks in exchange of VC money. You can branch your "Libre" project any time, and continue building on top of infra developed using VC funds and which you get for free.
> Oh, and we're committed to the bevy integration. bevy_dioxus is already updated for 0.5 and we share corporate sponsors with the bevy folks.
I checked out the crate and am still a bit confused. If i may, is it a goal of bevy_dioxus to allow standard bevy gamedev but with the UI portion handled by dioxus?
Yes, a big feature bevy is lacking is a decent editor. There's been an ongoing push to get dioxus into bevy to accelerate the editor development. Bevy's ECS model is good for games but hasn't been cleanly mapped into the traditional GUI space yet. Dioxus is composable so you can integrate it at multiple levels. The bevy folks are using our virtualdom plus state management with their own renderer.
> Oh, and we're committed to the bevy integration. bevy_dioxus is already updated for 0.5 and we share corporate sponsors with the bevy folks.
Silly question, but where can I see the updated bevy integration?
It looks like https://crates.io/crates/bevy_dioxus/ is still using dioxus 0.2 and bevy 0.7 - both of which are quite old. Does your official bevy integration have some other name?
Axum is certainly where it is at and where it has been for a while in terms of HTTP server frameworks. I'd say actix is in second place for sure, but it is wholly viable regardless. Rocket is no longer in the running as far as I'm concerned, and it hasn't been for quite some time.
Dioxus is certainly taking the head spot in front end. I still have more concern about the venture backing than I have confidence about it, but for better or for worse, it is certainly the best attempt at this so far. I enjoyed yew as a react-style framework, but its development is slow. Dioxus has made a lot of progress, and in my experience, it is currently the best experience that can be had.
It's hard to say if now is the correct time, but I'd be watching it closely if I were you. There's been major work to improve the framework with many of the interfaces changing. Now might be a good time because of the progress made here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more changes in store. Although I imagine that you're used to that from bevy anyway.
Not sure if you've already seen this, but back in November, Rocket 0.5 (stable) was released, and a 501(c)3 dedicated to Rocket was formed that now owns the Github org, etc. As a result, it's been getting much more regular updates, with the original maintainer still involved in development but no longer the only person with push access.
I'd certainly agree that it's no longer the de facto top leader, but as a batteries-included HTTP server, it works well (it's been chugging along powering my personal website for years now) and as far as I know still has quite a sizeable userbase.
> in general a good experience, but it was also clear that lots of things were still missing
I'll second that. I was working on a GUI frontend for sshfs in Dioxus about 9 months ago. My impression was that it's a really, really good GUI framework... until you run into a wall because the developers aren't finished with some feature yet.
Sharing state across different contexts can also be a pain sometimes, but that's true of every GUI framework I've ever used, regardless of language or underlying technologies. Dioxus 0.5 looks like a big leap forward in this regard.
My blog uses Dioxus to render a sizable portion of its HTML. In that use case, its limits aren't pushed, and it does a wonderful job.
It is poor man's GC, but the memory semantics are exactly the same as the previous version. Since `use_hook` owns a value for the lifetime of the component, that value is dropped when the component drops. All signals still `use_hook` so their lifetimes are the same. No performance impact whatsoever since we generally discourage calling `GenerationalBox::new()` outside of use_hook.
Now if you spammed `GenerationalBox::new()` in a loop or something, yeah, your garbage will exist until the component drops. But most of the time folks will just push/pop from a Map or a Vec and regular memory semantics apply.
I’m not a Rust programmer, but I’m curious, and I’m wondering if someone could explain how their generational-box crate works? [1]
I understand that it’s some kind of arena allocation, but I don’t understand how they support copying without copying, or how this is safe:
> Internally, generational-box creates an arena of generational RefCell's that are recycled when the owner is dropped. You can think of the cells as something like &'static RefCell<Box<dyn Any>> with a generational check to make recycling a cell easier to debug. Then GenerationalBox's are Copy because the &'static pointer is Copy
Like okay, you can create a pointer to static data, but what if it’s something that doesn’t have a static lifetime?
We are copying the reference to the data, not the data itself. The reference to the data lasts for the lifetime of the program. Generational box lets you insert data that last for shorter than the lifetime of the program (as long as that data contains no references). Once you drop the data you inserted, we reuse the box for other allocations.
It uses a very similar approach to a generational arena but with boxes instead of a centralized arena (to avoid locking issues). If you try to access the Copy reference to the data after it has been dropped, it will fail with a nice error message
All data you insert into a generational box needs to be allowed to last for the 'static lifetime (have no internal temporary pointers). You cannot insert something like &'a str into a generational box
I am not familiar with this crate, but I am with Rust, here’s my take:
Copy is a specific thing in Rust, it means that if a type implements the Copy trait, it can be copied via a memcpy, that is, it’s like a “shallow” copy as opposed to a “deep” copy.
So they’re not “copying without copying”, they’re letting you treat a non-Copy type as a Copy type, in my understanding.
> what if it’s something that doesn’t have a static lifetime?
The read me says it requires static content so the answer is “you can’t do that.”
Been following this for a while and super excited to see it out! I love how Dioxus captures a lot of what made React successful, but also while innovating on top of it and shipping at a super fast rate.
Congrats to the team. Excited to try out the signals in this release.
I kinda wish instead of RSX we got something closer to SwiftUI than to React/JSX
I feel like despite the name and all the good it did for JS and the web, React is not exactly how I would envision "reactive UI" code to look like in 2024 if we have the choice of designing a language (or DSL) from a blank state
Which is not to say SwiftUI is perfect, but whatever code I write with it feels much more neatly organized / compartmentalized than similar code using React
IMHO the only real advantage of using JSX for cross-platform GUIs is... to reuse existing libraries that were built for the web, which means something like RSX has very little "transferable value" other than letting the developer transfer their conceptual knowledge of JSX to RSX. I'd argue that's a worse tradeoff than having the developer learn some new paradigm that is (again IMHO) objectively superior to the React/JSX one
TL;DR "SwiftUI but cross-platform" is the project I wish existed but doesn't. I'm aware of @Tokamak/TokamakUI but that's still very much incomplete and activity seems to have waned
Thanks for sharing that. It looks very interesting and I had not come across it even after lots of googling. It's still in 0.2 but I will definitely keep track of its development, so thank you
I just picked Dioxus to build a decentralized homepage for Freenet[1], it will be the first decentralized website people see when they get Freenet set up. It reminds me a bit of my Kotlin web framework called Kweb[2] that I've been working on on-and-off for a few years now, particularly the way it handles state and the DSL that maps from code to HTML. So far I like what I see.
That's awesome!! I must've ran into kweb when designing the DSL at first - they're so similar. I'm secretly a huge kotlin fan and love the kotlin DSLs and concurrency models.
Hah, yes - I've been a big fan of Kotlin for the past decade or so, although Rust is growing on me rapidly. In particular, I think Rust's tooling is a lot better - too many headaches with Gradle.
I've pondered the idea of doing something like Kweb in Rust but looks like you've already done it with Dioxus so thank you for saving me the time :)
Tauri puts your frontend in the webview and you need to communicate with native Rust functions through an IPC boundary (like electron).
In Dioxus your Rust code lives on the native side, so you don't need IPC to do things like read from the file system, websockets, etc. Tauri also forces your frontend to compile to WASM, and a lot of interesting rust crates don't compile to wasm.
It's a little hard to express how much simpler it is to build when you don't have an IPC boundary. Dioxus' tooling is also dedicated to just Rust, so you can go from zero to bundled `.app` in less than a minute (12 seconds fresh build, 20 seconds fresh bundle).
That being said we're huge fans of Tauri and the flexibility it gives you (frontend in whatever web-compatible UI you want) and you can even use Dioxus in your Tauri apps!
I see what you mean, but to a reader unfamiliar with tauri this makes it sound really bad.
Here's how I use tauri:
Almost everything is native rust in the "backend" process, which is where main is. I don't need any ffi calls to write files, open ports, etc, it's a normal rust program that happens to have a web view.
So I've never had a problem with compiling to wasm, the GUI is TypeScript and the business logic is aot rust
The ipc boundary is annoying. It'll be faster in tauri 2, but in 1 it uses json or something internally, so you couldn't e.g. write a video player that uses a custom rust codec. Getting uncompressed video frames through ipc would kill perf
One of this release's features is getting byte streams into the webview using custom protocols. It's not as ideal as say, sharing a GPU texture with the webview, but powerful enough to do video streaming and data viz.
> Tauri also forces your frontend to compile to WASM
I’ve been using Tauri (1.x) for a couple years shipping a video editor and I don’t think this is true? I went searching to verify and I couldn’t find anything saying it complies to WASM (or at least not that it requires compiling to WASM). Can you point me to where you saw this?
If you want to use a Rust frontend framework with Tauri you need to compile to wasm. You typically use svelte/vue/react etc as the frontend, or I guess you could attempt some sort of MPA approach with SSR.
Ohh sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying there. I'm just using Svelte in TypeScript and running it in the browser so it doesn't need to do the WASM step.
I initially ran into that issue too (sending frames over IPC was not gonna work!) so I create a native OS-specific overlay and draw on it with wgpu.
The IPC layer has been a bit annoying and I'm looking forward to Tauri 2 where that'll get faster. I've worked around it for some stuff in the meantime by using a custom protocol and serializing stuff to binary.
I appreciated Dioxus directly addressing that in the README, but would also be interested to hear experiences from people with experience using both of them.
With Tauri, I built a toy desktop app to see whether the IPC was fast enough that the web frontend could update and do stuff on every keystroke without lagging (yes), and whether it could send a big file roundtrip from the frontend to the Rust layer and back to the frontend on every keystroke (no, not in my naive toy implementation anyway).
It seems like there's be many use cases where either Tauri or Dioxus would be fine, and some use cases where Dioxus would be better. Would love to hear comparative experiences, or even "we chose Dioxus|Tauri for our project because of X and Y" type stories.
Dioxus looks really cool, and I'm excited to try it.
Tauri and Dioxus both share a webview and all of Tauri's extensions/plugins work with dioxus, so the only real difference is where your code lives. Since Dioxus and Tauri share a good deal of architecture similarities, it's not really an "either/or" case and I'm sure whatever the Tauri folks try to monetize will work with Dioxus apps automatically.
You can choose between using the system's webview as your renderer or an experimental WGPU-based engine that pulls in stylo (the piece of servo shared with Firefox).
We're hoping to move folks to the WGPU renderer in the long term, but it's still pretty raw and many companies using Dioxus are pragmatic enough to know that a webview is a good enough solution for like 90% of apps.
I had a mixed feeling about your idea of writing your own HTML renderer (because making it so it is actually compatible with how browser engine are rendering their stuff is actually very hard, and even browser vendors don't actually agree on how everything should render) but seeing that you are leveraging work from servo, and even hired a former mozillian in that effort makes me much more confident in your ability to actually deliver.
I have started, stopped, rewrote, given up, and restarted development of a visual novel engine over and over again. My vision is something kind of like Ren'Py[1] but with cross-device game saves, cleaner packaging, improved DRM, better support for complex nonlinear plot development, and better tools for developing game mechanics that go beyond clicking through paragraphs of text.
A mobile/desktop/web-friendly GUI library that handles both conventional UI elements and 2D graphics elegantly would be a total game-changer for that project, which I'm hoping to get back to eventually.
I won't go into deep detail on my last stab at this project, but it involved making my own Ruby DSL compiler, making my own Ruby-to-Nim FFI library, and SDL2. It was pretty cool, and much faster than you'd expect, but also not very portable, and also nowhere close to complete.
> There’s still a tiny bit of unsafe floating around various dependencies that we plan to remove throughout the 0.5 release cycle
I'd love to see what these usages are, and what motivates this. I understand that sometimes people reach for unsafe too eagerly. But the std is full of unsafe and drawing the line there sometimes seems like a line in the sand.
I agree, people can be a little too afraid of unsafe. but I don't think it's necessarily ill-advised for a crate author to make a goal of removing unsafe from their crate.
crate authors that try to remove all unsafe often do it to relieve the burden of trust from the user.
_this_, in my opinion, is the power of the `unsafe` keyword (which probably should have been split into `trust_me` blocks and `check_yourself` functions). it constrains the conversations about memory safety into very tightly defined and auditable locations in the code, AND it creates new, manageable conversations about trust.
Honest question: I get why React has created the naming convention of "use*" for their hooks API. It makes sense to me. But why is in Dioxus creating a new signal called "use_signal"? This function call creates a new signal, doesn't it? The signal is not recreated on every rendering (that's the whole point of signals).
let mut count = use_signal(|| 0);
In SolidJS you create a signal with createSignal, which makes much more sense to me.
const [count, setCount] = createSignal(0)
The naming of the API matters, because state hooks behave much differently and might have complementing needs like "useMemo".
Is there a reason Dioxus for the "use_signal" naming other than trying to be close to React?
Dioxus still re-renders components but throws a lot of optimizations at the rsx that components generate, getting it close to solid's performance. It's more like preact than it is solid.
Optimizations include:
- splitting out dynamic pieces of the UI into their own "diff bin"
- memoizations by default
- signals implicitly marking attributes as dirty / managed
Very interesting, thanks. I wished / wondered back when I was on a React project, why the memoization can't be turned on by default. I felt performance opt was left to the dev in React. Dioxus seems to have taken this into the framework, which I think is a great decision.
It was 3 months of work and you probably saw our alphas kicking around for a while.
We had been thinking about this rewrite for like 6 months, but put it off for a while. Glad we dove into it since the finished product is so much better.
Agreed, but we've been doing a lot of R&D discovering new ways of doing things. Dioxus was the first Rust framework to do template-based hotreloading and we couldn't have predicted that was even possible 2 years ago.
The Copy-state stuff also seemed impossible a year ago, so no way to plan ahead. Now, I think things have matured enough that there's hopefully not a major major rewrite for a long time.
I think we had a prototype of it a long time ago but couldn't figure out how to implement drop. Leptos came out but just leaked the runtime in its initial rev. We figured we could safely recycle the runtimes and voila, problem solved.
How is the support for SVG which I can interact with? I’m thinking of something like drawing a sudoku as an SVG, then letting people click on each cell.
I've tackled UI from both the web end and the rust end, and I honestly can't say which I prefer. Javascript is definitely quicker and easier, I'll give you that, but I hold my nose when writing in it and people have been building interfaces in compiled/typed languages for decades without issue. I'd say it really depends on developer preference. I've grown to appreciate working with typed interfaces, and rust's compiler eliminates so many pains of working in the low-level space that I think it hits a really good mix of usability and performance. Do UIs really need the performance that the nerds on here gripe about every time something like Electron comes up? Probably not, so maybe HTML+Javascript (or WASM) is the winning combo. I don't really care either way, as long as I don't have to learn 5 different languages, platforms, UI frameworks, etc to release an app for desktop and phones as a single developer. And I already know Rust, so another option in that regard is welcome.
I also appreciate static type systems, but they both have one. It seems like what kind of static type system it is matters a lot for programmer convenience.
I'm using TypeScript nowadays (via Deno), and it seems quite flexible. (Deno is built using Rust, but that's not visible to the programmer.)
I would try Flutter again if I wanted to write a mobile app. I'm not wild about stateful / stateless widgets, though. Signals seem nicer.
I found it hit a strange position between trying to be friendly and trying to be powerful. Things felt very inconsistent. After learning a few patterns in the language, other things I would expect to follow the same patterns went off in their own direction. I wish I could conjure up more specific examples but that's about all I remember from it.
It felt like a language that was built for the singular purpose of supporting Flutter (which I actually did enjoy learning) instead of something that needed to exist in its own right. I wish they'd just picked something already baked.
Well, it was created before Flutter, so it wasn't built for that purpose. They did however steer Dart's direction in a way that would be more suitable for Flutter than as a JS replacement which is what it was created for. I don't think it's fair to criticize Dart in the way you have without giving any examples. I haven't found it to be trying to be powerful at all. For example it uses async-await, defaults to dynamic arrays and doesn't focus on classes as much as eg. Java. So I find it to be simple on all accounts. And the developers have specifically stated that their intention with the language is to be as intuitive as possible with the smallest amount of surprises. And I've found that to be the case. I almost never need to actually look at the documentation. Meanwhile I always find myself in MDN looking at some strange JS API (`Date`, for example) despite using it for much longer. And don't even get me started on Java.
Does anyone know how well this integrates with web components? I struggled getting Shoelace components to run well with Yew. It was doable, but by the time I had it working I decided I was using the wrong tool for the job. I'd like to revisit that project with another Rust framework though when I can find the time.
Oh, that’s great. I suppose it’d be nice if I could supply my own types, but strings aren’t the end of the world. Thank you for pointing me at that example.
Also, thank you for linking to a particular commit. I wish GitHub would do that by default. The web is littered with GitHub links that either no longer work or highlight incorrect lines.
I did a `dx build --release --platform web` of their default client-only web template and the resulting `du -sh dist/` is 2.1M. The .wasm file is 1.9M.
I'm guessing there is no way that's getting smaller?
I have some projects in the 1kb to 100kb territory I wouldn't mind rewriting, but not to that size.
How does Dioxus fare as a native GUI lib? Last time I checked the focus was on web targets and both the built in wgpu renderer and skia backend were not supported as much.
Yeah, that was my impression too which is why I passed on it and went with Tauri instead. Which is not to say that Tauri perfectly map to the boxes I wanted checked, but beggars can't be choosers
Tauri and Dioxus both share a webview and all of Tauri's extensions/plugins work with dioxus, so the only real difference is where your code lives. Since Dioxus and Tauri share a good deal of architecture similarities, it's not really an "either/or" case and I'm sure whatever the Tauri folks try to monetize will work with Dioxus apps automatically.
IMO if you're building an app in Rust, you probably want to avoid the wasm build step and shim out to the little bit of JS here-and-there for interactions you can't quite get in Dioxus.
Dioxus web compiles to WASM, but we compile to native code for desktop rendering to make it easier to interact with native APIs like the filesystem. We just use the web browser for rendering
No, but we've been helping authors of popular crates prep for the update. Crate authors can submit their projects to https://github.com/dioxus-community/ and we'll help maintain and update them.
Yesterday there was another really interesting rust library, egui, on the front page of HN. I can tell that this is more like react, but how do they compare in other regards?
You're probably not going to be building an email client or the next instagram in egui, but it is good for stuff where you're fine with re-rendering every entire frame (data viz, graphics stuff).
With these 0.5 changes the Dioxus authors remove almost all the complexities that I ran into when working on Ebou. I haven't played around with it yet, but the removal of lifetimes and constant cloning will make it a much more pleasant experience. I'm looking forward to trying it out, congratulations to the team for such an awesome release!
[1]: https://github.com/terhechte/Ebou
There are about a dozen Rust frameworks [1] that are trying to do the "native, reactive UI" you can deploy on desktop, web/wasm, mobile, etc. I'm worried about betting on the wrong horse and being stuck maintaining abandonware or being faced with a painful and pointless migration.
In a similar evolutionary race, there were dozens of Rust HTTP server frameworks. Now Axum, Actix, and Rocket appear to have the lead. I'm worried I made the wrong choice as the community momentum appears to be shifting to Axum.
Is there any indication Dioxus will win? It looks to have a large community, venture backing [2] (a good sign!), and more momentum than some of the others. I'd like to use one of these frameworks now, but I worry it's too early to place a bet. Are there any good indicators that now is a good time to start using it?
Are Leptos and Yew the other top contenders? These are the two names I hear the most, apart from Dioxus. What would make them a better (or worse) choice?
My company is heavily invested in Rust, Actix, and Bevy. We're looking at pairing Bevy with Dioxus or a similar framework to deliver native desktop and mobile clients in the future. I just want to make the right choice.
Also, stupid question: is Dioxus named after the Pokemon [3]? The logo makes me think there's something to that, but there are no Pokemon references in the codebase.
[1] https://github.com/flosse/rust-web-framework-comparison
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dioxus-labs
[3] https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Deoxys_(Pok%C3%A9m...
Yew has had about 10 commits in the past 6 months and the original creator has since moved on.
Leptos is a good solution for web-app type stuff, but IMO there's a big usability gap. I'll let the community be the judge there, but I wrote up some differences here: https://github.com/dioxusLabs/dioxus/?tab=readme-ov-file#dio... Leptos was fortunate enough to receive a lot of attention from youtubers on its launch.
The most important thing here: we raised venture money for Dioxus. We have many years of runway, are pretty lean, and exclusively focused on pouring resources into making the best GUI library for Rust (and potentially branching out to Python/JS). Getting into YC isn't easy, raising money isn't easy, and there's currently no other Rust projects with similar goals, talent, and financial backing. Biased of course.
Oh, and we're committed to the bevy integration. bevy_dioxus is already updated for 0.5 and we share corporate sponsors with the bevy folks.
Final point, legally, no we're not inspired by any pokemon with a similar sounding name. Even though that pokemon is awesome.
Important, but in a _bad_ way? What will the VC expect out of Dioxus? How will you make money?
As much is the idealist in me wants to do that with no venture backing, the realist in me knows we need Dioxus to be self sustaining and providing legitimate value for people to switch. Google spends 76 million dollars a year on catering alone - there's no way you can compete with Android and Flutter without huge resources.
Apple and Google capture the value for their platforms via fees and lock-in. Our goal is to capture value by providing really good utilities for building and deploying apps. You can't move heaven and earth without a really big lever, and venture gives us more leverage.
We've got a decent amount of enterprise adoption and I think there's money to be made by selling something like a self-hosted Vercel. TBD on licensing - I'd want it to be open source but we wouldn't want people reselling our deploy platform.
We raised a seed to prove that people want to build with dioxus. If that hypotheses is validated, then we invest in the deploy model. If not, we have OSS grants and corporate sponsors that will keep the project alive for years even if the VC money runs out.
I'm not super interested in making money at the hobbyist tier - those developers are our evangelists. Enterprise self hosting is likely harder but I think we can provide a lot of value to teams building apps in large companies.
It's probably another year of iteration until I feel like we're 100% stable, but my penchant for another rewrite is at an all time low.
What is Dioxus's competitive proposition vs those two? The performance and memory efficiency+safety of Rust is one, any others?
Flutter is written in Dart but renders to a canvas on the web making it a very, very poor choice for web apps. Especially backend/fullstack apps. Plus you can't use tailwind or whatever flavor of css library there is today. Flutter just nailed the "get up and running" part which we've got as well: `cargo binstall dioxus-cli`, `dx new`, `dx bundle` is literally less than 30 seconds. Hopefully `dx deploy` coming soon.
Electron is... it's electron. A whole chromium instance, an IPC bridge between your frontend and the system, NodeJS, etc. If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb. You can easily deploy them on an embedded/low end device. We're hoping to eat some market share in the embedded-ish land (not true embedded, but like industrial or POS).
Dioxus also has mobile and desktop compatible server functions which basically no other projects have. Expo has been kinda exploring this space. One of our examples is deploying your own LLM on your own infrastructure with a dioxus mobile app UI and it fits in a single file and builds in under a minute.
> If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb.
I'm aware of this from familiarity with Tauri, but hearing it again still amazes me. Very cool.
I have an app in mind I want to build, and really would like to have standalone versions on Android+iOS+Linux+Mac+Windows, plus a web app. But there's no way I can manage all that as a single developer. And the fact no development tool has really nailed this yet is telling how hard it is. Whoever really gets this right will save a ton of developer hours across the industry, and that's valuable. Good luck, hope you guys pull it off!
PS - one feature request: a local/offline-first mode that eases development of apps that work even with poor or no internet connection. Basically I want to build something like Obsidian that is multi-platform, and does all processing and data storage locally first, in an accessible format like SQLLite or flat files, then syncs with the cloud when available, all with as few developer resources as possible. A tool that enables that would be amazing.
Flutter has an HTML renderer (https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers), but it's lower-performance than CanvasKit.
Why would Dioxus be any different? If VC's cared about tearing down walled gardens of Google and Apple, why not explicitly donate the money instead? Why have strings attached at all?
OSS backend libraries are easily forked, and someone is usually willing to hack on a database library, but GUIs tend to be boring to work on, and designers don't tend to have to the same gumption to work for free that developers do.
Donations are great but they're not how the system works, unfortunately. Dioxus could never compete with the two most valuable companies on earth if it wasn't a self-sustaining business. VC just lets me scale the team from 2 people to 10(?) and have some cash to iterate. We were "profitable" even before taking venture money.
Now we're able to take on more moonshot-type projects like the blitz renderer, a deploy platform, UI fuzz tooling, and more. We're using our seed round exclusively to make dioxus as awesome as possible, so even if it doesn't work out at a venture level, there's still a really cool, polished, end-to-end app framework that you can build and ship with in Rust.
https://dracc.commonsconservancy.org/0035/
https://tauri.app/about/governance
Just for me personally, I don't see the financialization of open source software as an intrinsic good thing and I reflect my technology choices to support this when applicable.
Tauri is seeking monetization via CrabNebula, but I can see how the governance structure would secure more confidence in the OSS side.
http://crabnebula.dev
so, what they use instead? Bugged, dead OSS dropped by creators?..
Ok, if you find corp which will give you funding for your project without any expectations, then it is a win. But I am not sure how often this happens.
there are several ways to monetize:
- consultancy
- "Pro" extensions on top of OSS core
Enterprise extensions means the cursed land of open core and refusing to have features in the open source version, or a heavy SaaS push combined with a possible license change along the road, and these are the primary reasons to avoid VC-backed "open source for now".
yes, there are risks in exchange of VC money. You can branch your "Libre" project any time, and continue building on top of infra developed using VC funds and which you get for free.
But what are other choices?
I checked out the crate and am still a bit confused. If i may, is it a goal of bevy_dioxus to allow standard bevy gamedev but with the UI portion handled by dioxus?
Silly question, but where can I see the updated bevy integration?
It looks like https://crates.io/crates/bevy_dioxus/ is still using dioxus 0.2 and bevy 0.7 - both of which are quite old. Does your official bevy integration have some other name?
Dioxus is certainly taking the head spot in front end. I still have more concern about the venture backing than I have confidence about it, but for better or for worse, it is certainly the best attempt at this so far. I enjoyed yew as a react-style framework, but its development is slow. Dioxus has made a lot of progress, and in my experience, it is currently the best experience that can be had.
It's hard to say if now is the correct time, but I'd be watching it closely if I were you. There's been major work to improve the framework with many of the interfaces changing. Now might be a good time because of the progress made here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more changes in store. Although I imagine that you're used to that from bevy anyway.
I'd certainly agree that it's no longer the de facto top leader, but as a batteries-included HTTP server, it works well (it's been chugging along powering my personal website for years now) and as far as I know still has quite a sizeable userbase.
[1] https://rocket.rs/news/2023-11-17-version-0.5/
I'll second that. I was working on a GUI frontend for sshfs in Dioxus about 9 months ago. My impression was that it's a really, really good GUI framework... until you run into a wall because the developers aren't finished with some feature yet.
Sharing state across different contexts can also be a pain sometimes, but that's true of every GUI framework I've ever used, regardless of language or underlying technologies. Dioxus 0.5 looks like a big leap forward in this regard.
My blog uses Dioxus to render a sizable portion of its HTML. In that use case, its limits aren't pushed, and it does a wonderful job.
However I'm a bit perplexed with the solution to remove lifetimes [0]. Isn't it a poor's-man GC? What was the performance impact?
[0]: https://crates.io/crates/generational-box
Side-note: `[generational-box](https://crates.io/crates/generational-box)` link is broken
Now if you spammed `GenerationalBox::new()` in a loop or something, yeah, your garbage will exist until the component drops. But most of the time folks will just push/pop from a Map or a Vec and regular memory semantics apply.
This is essentially just ARC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Reference_Counting
I understand that it’s some kind of arena allocation, but I don’t understand how they support copying without copying, or how this is safe:
> Internally, generational-box creates an arena of generational RefCell's that are recycled when the owner is dropped. You can think of the cells as something like &'static RefCell<Box<dyn Any>> with a generational check to make recycling a cell easier to debug. Then GenerationalBox's are Copy because the &'static pointer is Copy
Like okay, you can create a pointer to static data, but what if it’s something that doesn’t have a static lifetime?
[1] https://crates.io/crates/generational-box
It uses a very similar approach to a generational arena but with boxes instead of a centralized arena (to avoid locking issues). If you try to access the Copy reference to the data after it has been dropped, it will fail with a nice error message
Copy is a specific thing in Rust, it means that if a type implements the Copy trait, it can be copied via a memcpy, that is, it’s like a “shallow” copy as opposed to a “deep” copy.
So they’re not “copying without copying”, they’re letting you treat a non-Copy type as a Copy type, in my understanding.
> what if it’s something that doesn’t have a static lifetime?
The read me says it requires static content so the answer is “you can’t do that.”
Congrats to the team. Excited to try out the signals in this release.
I feel like despite the name and all the good it did for JS and the web, React is not exactly how I would envision "reactive UI" code to look like in 2024 if we have the choice of designing a language (or DSL) from a blank state
Which is not to say SwiftUI is perfect, but whatever code I write with it feels much more neatly organized / compartmentalized than similar code using React
IMHO the only real advantage of using JSX for cross-platform GUIs is... to reuse existing libraries that were built for the web, which means something like RSX has very little "transferable value" other than letting the developer transfer their conceptual knowledge of JSX to RSX. I'd argue that's a worse tradeoff than having the developer learn some new paradigm that is (again IMHO) objectively superior to the React/JSX one
TL;DR "SwiftUI but cross-platform" is the project I wish existed but doesn't. I'm aware of @Tokamak/TokamakUI but that's still very much incomplete and activity seems to have waned
[1] https://freenet.org/
[2] https://kweb.io/
I've pondered the idea of doing something like Kweb in Rust but looks like you've already done it with Dioxus so thank you for saving me the time :)
https://github.com/dioxusLabs/dioxus/?tab=readme-ov-file#dio...
Tauri puts your frontend in the webview and you need to communicate with native Rust functions through an IPC boundary (like electron).
In Dioxus your Rust code lives on the native side, so you don't need IPC to do things like read from the file system, websockets, etc. Tauri also forces your frontend to compile to WASM, and a lot of interesting rust crates don't compile to wasm.
It's a little hard to express how much simpler it is to build when you don't have an IPC boundary. Dioxus' tooling is also dedicated to just Rust, so you can go from zero to bundled `.app` in less than a minute (12 seconds fresh build, 20 seconds fresh bundle).
That being said we're huge fans of Tauri and the flexibility it gives you (frontend in whatever web-compatible UI you want) and you can even use Dioxus in your Tauri apps!
Here's how I use tauri:
Almost everything is native rust in the "backend" process, which is where main is. I don't need any ffi calls to write files, open ports, etc, it's a normal rust program that happens to have a web view.
So I've never had a problem with compiling to wasm, the GUI is TypeScript and the business logic is aot rust
The ipc boundary is annoying. It'll be faster in tauri 2, but in 1 it uses json or something internally, so you couldn't e.g. write a video player that uses a custom rust codec. Getting uncompressed video frames through ipc would kill perf
I'll take a look how dioxus solves this
I’ve been using Tauri (1.x) for a couple years shipping a video editor and I don’t think this is true? I went searching to verify and I couldn’t find anything saying it complies to WASM (or at least not that it requires compiling to WASM). Can you point me to where you saw this?
Here's a guide for using Yew with Tauri. Notice how you need to install wasm-bindgen and wasm-pack. https://dev.to/stevepryde/create-a-desktop-app-in-rust-using...
How'd you get that working?
The IPC layer has been a bit annoying and I'm looking forward to Tauri 2 where that'll get faster. I've worked around it for some stuff in the meantime by using a custom protocol and serializing stuff to binary.
I appreciated Dioxus directly addressing that in the README, but would also be interested to hear experiences from people with experience using both of them.
With Tauri, I built a toy desktop app to see whether the IPC was fast enough that the web frontend could update and do stuff on every keystroke without lagging (yes), and whether it could send a big file roundtrip from the frontend to the Rust layer and back to the frontend on every keystroke (no, not in my naive toy implementation anyway).
It seems like there's be many use cases where either Tauri or Dioxus would be fine, and some use cases where Dioxus would be better. Would love to hear comparative experiences, or even "we chose Dioxus|Tauri for our project because of X and Y" type stories.
Dioxus looks really cool, and I'm excited to try it.
We're hoping to move folks to the WGPU renderer in the long term, but it's still pretty raw and many companies using Dioxus are pragmatic enough to know that a webview is a good enough solution for like 90% of apps.
I wish you good luck!
I have started, stopped, rewrote, given up, and restarted development of a visual novel engine over and over again. My vision is something kind of like Ren'Py[1] but with cross-device game saves, cleaner packaging, improved DRM, better support for complex nonlinear plot development, and better tools for developing game mechanics that go beyond clicking through paragraphs of text.
A mobile/desktop/web-friendly GUI library that handles both conventional UI elements and 2D graphics elegantly would be a total game-changer for that project, which I'm hoping to get back to eventually.
I won't go into deep detail on my last stab at this project, but it involved making my own Ruby DSL compiler, making my own Ruby-to-Nim FFI library, and SDL2. It was pretty cool, and much faster than you'd expect, but also not very portable, and also nowhere close to complete.
[1]: https://renpy.org/
I'd love to see what these usages are, and what motivates this. I understand that sometimes people reach for unsafe too eagerly. But the std is full of unsafe and drawing the line there sometimes seems like a line in the sand.
We use it in 3 places:
- fixing some FFI on iOS
- enabling function-call syntax for signals (took this implementation from dtolnay)
- implementing Send/Sync for an ID that uses a pointer as a hash (which honestly could be removed in lieu of a usize, now that I'm looking at it)
crate authors that try to remove all unsafe often do it to relieve the burden of trust from the user.
_this_, in my opinion, is the power of the `unsafe` keyword (which probably should have been split into `trust_me` blocks and `check_yourself` functions). it constrains the conversations about memory safety into very tightly defined and auditable locations in the code, AND it creates new, manageable conversations about trust.
Is there a reason Dioxus for the "use_signal" naming other than trying to be close to React?
Optimizations include: - splitting out dynamic pieces of the UI into their own "diff bin" - memoizations by default - signals implicitly marking attributes as dirty / managed
So, still react-like
We had been thinking about this rewrite for like 6 months, but put it off for a while. Glad we dove into it since the finished product is so much better.
If you have to rewrite your code once a year, maybe it helps to plan ahead before coding.
But, if you can rewrite your code once a year, you might not have too much code to worry about.
The Copy-state stuff also seemed impossible a year ago, so no way to plan ahead. Now, I think things have matured enough that there's hopefully not a major major rewrite for a long time.
I think we had a prototype of it a long time ago but couldn't figure out how to implement drop. Leptos came out but just leaked the runtime in its initial rev. We figured we could safely recycle the runtimes and voila, problem solved.
How is the support for SVG which I can interact with? I’m thinking of something like drawing a sudoku as an SVG, then letting people click on each cell.
Flutter/Dart promises this, but I really, really hate Dart.
It's good for other things like performance and safe concurrency, but a language that has GC seems easier for web development.
I'm using TypeScript nowadays (via Deno), and it seems quite flexible. (Deno is built using Rust, but that's not visible to the programmer.)
I would try Flutter again if I wanted to write a mobile app. I'm not wild about stateful / stateless widgets, though. Signals seem nicer.
And maybe this Rust framework will work out?
It felt like a language that was built for the singular purpose of supporting Flutter (which I actually did enjoy learning) instead of something that needed to exist in its own right. I wish they'd just picked something already baked.
Everything should work like normal except: attributes are not typed, custom event listeners must be implemented with web-sys
Also, thank you for linking to a particular commit. I wish GitHub would do that by default. The web is littered with GitHub links that either no longer work or highlight incorrect lines.
I'm guessing there is no way that's getting smaller?
I have some projects in the 1kb to 100kb territory I wouldn't mind rewriting, but not to that size.
You can get hello world to sub 50kb. Our todomvc in the docs gets to 234kb.
Also note that wasm starts really really quickly, so it's not 1:1 JS<->WASM.
https://dioxuslabs.com/learn/0.5/cookbook/optimizing
IMO if you're building an app in Rust, you probably want to avoid the wasm build step and shim out to the little bit of JS here-and-there for interactions you can't quite get in Dioxus.
You're probably not going to be building an email client or the next instagram in egui, but it is good for stuff where you're fine with re-rendering every entire frame (data viz, graphics stuff).