DEV-TOOLSApril 7, 20261 min read19 views

Xilem – An experimental Rust native UI framework

Xilem and Masonry offer a high-level, reactive architecture for building native GUI applications in Rust, drawing inspiration from modern frameworks like SwiftUI and React.

Xilem and Masonry provide an experimental high-level architecture for writing GUI apps in Rust.

Masonry is a foundational crate for building natively compiled GUIs in Rust. It provides a retained widget tree and runs event handling and update passes on it.

Xilem is a high-level reactive framework inspired by React, SwiftUI and Elm. It lets users create a lightweight view tree, and changes the rendered app based on changes to the tree. It has a web backend and a Masonry backend.

Note for new users: If you're not sure what to use between Xilem and Masonry, you probably want Xilem. In general, if you're trying to make an app with minimum hassle, you probably want Xilem. Xilem is a UI framework, whereas Masonry is a toolkit for building UI frameworks (including Xilem).

Xilem and Masonry are built on top of:

winit for window creation.
Vello and wgpu for 2D graphics.
Parley and Fontique for the text stack.
AccessKit for plugging into accessibility APIs.

To add Xilem as a dependency to your project, run: cargo add xilem

You need to have installed pkg-config, clang, and the development packages of wayland, libxkbcommon, libxcb, and vulkan-loader.

This version of Xilem has been verified to compile with Rust 1.92 and later. Future versions might increase the Rust version requirement.

Discussion of Xilem development happens in the Linebender Zulip, specifically the #xilem channel. Contributions are welcome by pull request under the Apache License 2.0.

Source: Hacker News

More in this category

dev-tools

OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation

OpenAI and Hugging Face detailed a security incident where an AI agent exploited vulnerabilities during internal cyber capability evaluations, underscoring the critical need for advanced safeguards as AI models gain sophisticated technical capabilities.

dev-tools

The State of Simulation for Physical AI: An Overview

Data availability is the primary bottleneck for Physical AI. GPU-accelerated simulation platforms solve this by generating scalable synthetic datasets to train, test, and deploy next-generation robotics systems.

dev-tools

Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

Farid Zakaria shares his journey of proposing a patch to the Linux kernel to support relocatable binaries in Nix, which evolved into a powerful eBPF-based solution for binfmt_misc.

dev-tools

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

A Nikkei study reveals that off-balance-sheet debts at five major US tech companies have surged eightfold to $1.65 trillion, driven by massive AI investments like data center leases and GPU contracts.

dev-tools

Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral

Two developers successfully built a custom CPU from scratch at the logic gate level, deployed it on an FPGA, and optimized its memory architecture to run the classic game DOOM.

dev-tools

Incremental – A library for incremental computations

Incremental is a library designed for building complex computations that update efficiently when inputs change. Inspired by self-adjusting computation research, it is highly useful for large-scale calculations, GUI views, and data synchronization.