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Dioxus 0.6 – Crossplatform apps with Rust

by jkelleyrtp on 12/11/24, 3:24 PM with 137 comments

  • by suby on 12/11/24, 7:21 PM

    I'd like to report my experience trying out this release.

    I did a cargo install. I then used the dx command line app to create a new project. After initialization I ran dx serve in the directory as instructed, but it gave me a compiler error with seemingly no feedback on what specifically went wrong. And again, this is for a hello world app that they generated for me. I'm unsure how to obtain more information on why it failed.

    I feel like I'd have more insight and ability to debug this if I were trying to compile using a standard rust workflow rather than their CLI tool.

    You can press v to enable verbose logging, but this doesn't add information which provides clarity to me. Here's the compiler output with verbose logging, though heavily edited to be readable in this HN comment box

    14:17:49 [dev] Building server...

    14:17:49 [dev] Building app...

    14:17:49 [dev] Executing cargo...

    14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--profile", "server-dev", "-- verbose", "--features", "dioxus/server", "--bin", "hack"]

    14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--verbose", "--features", "desktop", "--bin", "hack"]

    14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--profile", "server-dev", "--verbose", "--features", "dioxus/server", "--bin", "hack"]

    14:17:50 [dev] Setting builder to failed state

    14:17:50 [dev] Build failed: Other(Cargo build failed, signaled by the compiler)

    Status: Failed

  • by echelon on 12/11/24, 3:58 PM

    I've been interested in Dioxus, Leptos, egui, etc. for awhile, but I have to admit I don't know the technical workings of the framework.

    On desktop/mobile, does Dioxus run as a native app? Is it an immediate mode renderer like egui? How do you style it? Or is it JavaScript + webview/electron?

    On the web does it run as a WASM binary against a canvas renderer, or is it write to DOM? How does it talk to the DOM? WASM, JavaScript transpilation, etc.?

    Can you do multithreading on web with web workers? Is the async story good? HTTP/gRPC clients?

    Do you have to build your entire app in Dioxus, or can you incorporate other web (eg. React) apps? Can it talk to JavaScript?

    How solid is the API now? Is it going to change a lot in the near future?

    Do you think it'd be trivial to stuff a Bevy game inside of a Dioxus shell? We've thought it might be easier to prototype the UX outside the engine, especially since web is a deployment target.

    How big is the community?

    Looking into this for a project soon, so if any of the Dioxus devs can answer some of this, I'd super appreciate it. (Sorry for all the questions which may already be answered in the FAQ/docs.)

  • by jjallen on 12/11/24, 5:32 PM

    Every six months or so I long for a consensus rust gui framework and try this one and run into an error from downloading the demo or playground or something like that.

    Some of us want to invest many years of time and money into stuff and have to make the decision carefully.

  • by ewuhic on 12/11/24, 4:44 PM

    Dioxus drastically lacks in ecosystem. There is not a single component library out there. I'm also not sure about virtual DOM.

    I do track and use their main competitor - Leptos.

  • by oDot on 12/11/24, 5:23 PM

    After discovering and adopting[0] Lustre, I can't think of using anything other than The Elm Architecture. It is so much more ergonomic it's not even comparable to today's mainstream state management techniques.

    I'm also building a screenplay editor prototype[1] in the Rust equivalent, Iced, and while not as ergonomic as Lustre and Gleam, it is TEA. Iced is still in flux but I have trust, considering System76 uses it to build Cosmic.

    [0]: https://blog.nestful.app/p/gleams-lustre-is-frontend-develop...

    [1]: https://www.weedonandscott.com/tech/project-realm

  • by diablozzq on 12/11/24, 4:08 PM

    I’ve been watching this for a while. It’s the most promising tech framework I’ve seen. If they succeed, it could obsolete all other frameworks.

    Mobile, desktop, web, rust

    They have an eye on performance up front which is where most previous attempts fail.

    And rust gives them the security and performance foundation up front.

    .5 was a huge leap, this looks like the polish that should make it viable.

  • by weinzierl on 12/11/24, 6:17 PM

    Dioxus raised venture capital, so I'd be careful before betting my future on them.

    Do they require copyright assignment or a CLA? I could not find anything on their GitHub.

    How many of their contributors are payed?

  • by ianpurton on 12/12/24, 10:54 AM

    I'm using Dioxus on the server side and have written about it here. https://rust-on-nails.com/

    The way you write components is really great and the overall developer experience is very good.

  • by solidninja on 12/12/24, 1:41 PM

    Dioxus is the only web-platform technology toolkit that I see having the ability to be cross-platform and use Javascript as little as possible - glad to see their native WGPU rendering stack progress (check out the videos by Nico Burns on Blitz, Taffy etc)

  • by ryukoposting on 12/12/24, 2:16 AM

    I tried Dioxus out earlier this year - I wanted to make a little SSHFS GUI client. Think Google Drive UI but in a dedicated window and it's SSHFS instead of some cloud nonsense. Everything went swimmingly until I needed shared state between different contexts. From that point, the code got really messy, really quickly. I don't know what the right solution is for this problem. What I can say is Dioxus hasn't found it yet.

    The static HTML templating thing is pretty damn good, though. I actually use it to render parts of my blog.

  • by tdomhan on 12/12/24, 11:15 AM

    The new hot-reloading is amazing! Coming from another Rust web framework waiting for UI updates to show up has always been a huge painpoint, so thanks for this!

  • by gr4vityWall on 12/12/24, 3:07 PM

    Suggestion: the post title contrast with the page background could be improved.

    Question: where does Qt stands these days, and how does this toolkit compare to it regarding accessibility and handling HiDPI screens? Are there any quality bindings for languages that aren't C++ and Python? It feels like they solved a lot of problems long ago, and the toolkit could be way more popular with better bindings and tooling.

  • by andridk on 12/11/24, 4:25 PM

    Very cool demo, but If the application code is HTML/JS/CSS, then why do we need RSX?

    Is the web framework necessary? How does this compare, to say Tauri w. React & Vite?

  • by datadeft on 12/11/24, 3:54 PM

    Is Tauri and Dioxus similar projects, or those are made for different purposes?

  • by _blk on 12/11/24, 5:31 PM

    Sounds promising. I was looking at Tauri recently for an upcoming iOS/Android project but it doesn't seem mature enough. I will require bluetooth and with flutter I know how to go about it. How do you, @jkelleyrtp, feel Dioxus would perform in terms of DX for a dev comfortable with flutter, react and rust but a bit of a novice with Xcode. Publishing for iOS just always seems such a hassle, but if I can't get the last step done the whole project is worthless. With rsx, does Dioxus support more free-form layouts that are not the typical Gtk box in a box but more web-type layer over layer (i.e. absolute/static positioning in html or Flutter's Stack component)

  • by satvikpendem on 12/11/24, 6:17 PM

    Looking forward to this as I use Flutter personally but sometimes I write code for it via its FFI package flutter_rust_bridge, but it'd be nice to use Rust directly everywhere. I am also interested in the usage of the GPU as Flutter does because that way you get a consistent experience on the web as well as mobile and desktop. Flutter recently removed their HTML renderer because it was hard to keep both renderers in sync, but I don't believe Dioxus will do that as they started off HTML-first rather than mobile-first like Flutter.

  • by solarkraft on 12/11/24, 11:11 PM

    From a cursory look the Server Functions for Native seem like a what I imagined Tauri to be: A real RPC framework that skips you the anoyances of serialization.

  • by adastra22 on 12/12/24, 6:07 PM

    I want a Rust GUI framework or even entire app framework that can target desktop, mobile, and web, but I DON’T want to use web technologies other than when I am actually running within a browser. Is that Dioxus? I can’t tell the answer from what’s written here and in the comments.

  • by revskill on 12/12/24, 4:42 AM

    I love the simplicity of the flow: Mutation => Server returns full API for FE to rerender the whole page.

    Trying to figure out which parts of the page to auto reload is hacky to me.

    And it's the best proof of: Preoptimization is the root of all evil squares.

  • by _bin_ on 12/12/24, 6:23 PM

    this looks interesting and could be a cool option. have yet to dive in deep but tbh i'm uncomfortable using a Fancy New Framework that maintainers refuse to bump to >0 major version. i know semver is a bastardized wreck of its intended semantics but still, gotta stabilize at some point. could be misdirected here but i have a reactionary streak about this after seeing one too many 8 year old libraries with 5mil downloads that still won't freaking version a 1.0.0.

  • by kussenverboten on 12/11/24, 8:58 PM

    It works amazingly well. Great crate!!

  • by ecmascript on 12/12/24, 11:40 AM

    It's cool but I could never live with that syntax. Impossible to read, it feels like.

  • by sa-code on 12/11/24, 4:49 PM

    Would be cool to see a front end for this in Mojo when the language matures a bit

  • by trentontri on 12/12/24, 1:46 PM

    Have you considered contributing to Tauri?

  • by benatkin on 12/11/24, 7:33 PM

    The username of one of the devs :) https://github.com/DogeDark