Makepad: Designing modern UIs with Rust - Rik Arends - RustNL 2023

RustNL
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2023–2024
YouTube
60K views · 3 years ago · talk · expert · evergreen

Rik Arends of Makepad talks at RustNL 2023 about designing modern UIs with Rust. The talk covers Makepad's approach to fast, GPU-driven interfaces and includes a demo of a zoomable text interface.

HN points to it for the performance of Makepad's UI and the zoomable-text demo around the 14:45 mark.

“quite impressive performance wise”
Tools for thought & programming UXUI design craft
#makepad#rust#uiframework#zoomableinterface#performance

3 comments from Hacker News

d
@djhn2024 · in “Show HN: Orbit – A CSS radial UI composer framework”
I’ve been super interested in zoomable interfaces for text - there was an interesting demo in a rust conference talk: ▶ this video (skip to 14:45 to see it in action)
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r
@rvdca2023 · in “Makepad- Synthesizer Written in Rust”
For anyone interested, the main author (if I understood properly) did a presentation at RustNL on the UI aspect that was quite impressive performance wise : ▶ this video
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r
@rapnie2023 · in “Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers”
> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrot to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup. What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere. And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket. Btw. WebAssembly/WebGL isn't the only way in which Makepad is available. And while running well in the browser for a time, there were issues to be solved here (addressed in the presentation). And tbh this isn't a real answer to your assertion. Greg Johnston, creator of Leptos, has made a video with performance comparisons [2]. Edit: Adding a link to the synthesizer app I just found [3]. [0] link [1] ▶ this video [2] link [3] link
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