blitz

> So you have a DOM, but if the target renderer is not webview or browser, you create a DOM in some other way? Yes - we have a project called Blitz which is trying to emulate just the DOM without the browser. It's built on Servo/Firefox tech. https://github.com/dioxusLabs/blitz > The browser is already there, and called webview on all major platforms. I'd say Electron is popular for maturity reasons, that architecture makes limited sense even if you are using web. Tauri would be a better comparison. The default dioxus desktop/mobile renderer uses the system's webview for exactly this reason. The blitz stuff is still young but is planned to eventually replace the webview renderer. Fortunately, webviews are on many platforms already. > .. That also means users have to come up with the cross-platform API surfaces themselves, right? Yes, but

We don’t necessarily use Tauri… Tauri has a library called wry that’s basically a more maintained fork of the Rust web-view library. https://github.com/Boscop/web-view We are great friends with Tauri but I think people misunderstand our architecture and philosophy just because we use one of their maintained libraries. We’ve been working on a native HTML/CSS library for a while called blitz which is reaching stability soon. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

Yes, we're working on that over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz (alpha release imminent). Our TodoMVC example is current ~20mb with a standard release builds, but comes down to 7.2mb with some compiler flags like -Oz and LTO enabled (these numbers of from macOS). And we plan to allow fine grained configuration of the feature set, so if you don't need certain image formats or layout algorithms or networking support, then you can disable them and save on binary size.

As it happens, we are building pretty much that over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz There was also a recent HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41221252

I didn't submit this, but I'm the lead dev for Blitz. AMA. One thing to note is it's not quite ready yet: - The text input and focus system are pretty basic - We don't support scrolling (other than the root viewport) - Complex CSS selectors like nth-child and :has aren't working correctly yet. - Event handling integration with Dioxus (the React-like framework that sits on top of Blitz) isn't robust or fleshed out yet (only clicks work, there is no preventDefault) - The currently networking is super-dumb and does synchronous requests on the main thread. We need proper async and/or multithreaded networking. - We have put very little work into performance - we're currently recomputing style/layout/paint every frame. - Relatedly: We have few dumb memory leaks where nodes are not cleaned up. We know where these are, we just haven't fixed them

We're building one of these (out of a mix of servo, rust ui ecosystem and custom components). It's still pretty early (an initial alpha-quality 0.1 release is planned for the end of this month). We're planning to have a high standard of support for CSS and anything related to rendering, but we're not planning a JavaScript engine (although one could be added) with scripting being directly in Rust (with a Rust-based React alternative). https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

We have a decent chunk of layout and paint implemented in an HTML renderer I'm working on (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz), which is targeting the "electron" use case (but with a rust scripting interface rather than a JS one). The implementation is currently very immature and there are a lot of bugs and missing features (I only got a first cut of inline layout working yesterday (but we already have flexbox and grid implemented)), but we're already seeing pretty decent results on a bunch of real-world web pages and hope to be at the point where we can render most of the web (excl. JS) in the next 6 - 12 months. There are some screenshots on the PR for the inline layout branch https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/pull/63

Dioxus Labs (http://dioxuslabs.com) | Founding Rust Engineer | San Francisco | in-person | Full-time | 125-150k | 0.5-3% equity I'm Jonathan, the creator of Dioxus (YC S23). Dioxus is a popular crossplatform GUI library for Rust that, imo, is the easiest way to ship apps that are beautiful, fast, and robust. Dioxus is quite popular, almost 20k stars on GitHub, and we recently raised a sizable seed round from "top vcs." We have a lot of exciting projects on the horizon: - in-place binary patching for rust hotreloading (http://github.com/jkelleyrtp/ipbp) - a WGPU powered HTML/CSS renderer (http://github.com/dioxusLabs/blitz) - experiments with LLM-based component generation (http://github.com/dioxusLabs/dioxus-ai) - upcoming mobile tooling - TUI-based devtools for a ruby-on-rail like experience - a deploy platform for web/desktop/mobile/bac

Have you talked to the Dioxus people recently? They're working on a project called Dioxus Blitz; from what I'm told, they're trying to implement a minimal browser target, that provides some basic DOM-like features and renders with wgpu. It's not exactly what you're hoping for, but you might find common ground. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz (Also, the Linebender project is working on Masonry, with FFI as a medium-term goal.)