Patrik Smělý

@joshmanders AI $ changes a lot of things apparently.

Remember when Jarred said that Bun was only possible in a highly specialized snowflake language like Zig and that they HAVE to use h1-b workers because only people from the Zag region can truly speak Zig? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

@GregorySchier We use HarfBuzz for shaping because doing shaping yourself is really hard.

@SogoCZE I'm using cosmic-text/swash so get a lot of that already. Mostly having to worry about text atlas caching and other render side concerns. Can't imagine going down to the lowest levels 😳

About a month in and ~38k lines of Rust 🦀 - UI framework from scratch - Render targets for Smithay and wgpu - Working Wayland compositor - Windowing/workspaces/palette/alt+tab/hotkeys - Animations/blur/shadow/opacity - Lock screen - Screen recording/screenshots

@YoavCodes If its web-based you already lost at that mission.

I’m here to rescue you from the TUI. I might be the only person on the planet credibly positioned to build a good high performance GUI harness+IDE. Dash will save us. It’s almost ready.

@GregorySchier For me text rendering was the hardest. Its not easy to get shaping, subpixel alignment and font fallback right (for emojis …).

Currently rewriting the renderers from scratch and I'm almost done. So many basic things are so hard to do well: - Rendering text - Scroll region clipping - Effects like shadow/blur/opacity - Flex layouts based on child text content

@mrspockcz Škoda :(

Z pracovních inzerátů studia vyplývá, že pokračování pohání technologie Unreal Engine 5. Jednička vyšla v říjnu 2014 a běžela na vlastní enginu Cathode od Creative Assembly.

@MatejKnopp @krzyzanowskim Been there hb_coretext_font_set_funcs(font.hb_font);

@krzyzanowskim Wait until you find out that harfbuzz doesn't position emojis same way coretext does and some users complain about that.

I've got the custom layout and drawing and partial editing on iOS, macOS, Android. "fun" fact is emoji that on apple platform uses system Apple Emoji font, and on Android uses a Noto Emoji font. interesting thing to handle in the multiplatform environment is to make it feel right at home, without compromising the unified text layout.

@jezell Good

GPUI continues to gain traction on the desktop: x.com/tahayvr/status…

@idobbins @DanielW_Kiwi @theo Chrome uses Skia for text rendering and Skia uses platform native text rasterizer (CoreText on macOS, DirectWrite on Windows, FreeType on Linux). So saying that text rendering in native sucks compared to Chrome is kinda nonsense. Lol.

Throwing a react app together into an electron app is trivial to get started. This matters less in the AI era. According to @theo the native text rendering solutions actually kind of suck compared to chrome’s text rendering, which was surprising for me to hear. I’ve also never implemented a feature in a native stack that wasn’t easier in a web based technology (QT, GTK, Obj-C/AppKit, SwiftUi, Swing, WinForms, wxWidgets, are some I’ve tried over the years). So ‘needs a web rendering engine’ is not true but the ergonomics of others just aren’t there yet. I do hope this changes in the near future though.

Can someone explain why a desktop app needs a web rendering engine?

@vlads1776 @dreamsofcode_io GPUI (Zed)

@dreamsofcode_io People will complain about WebApps and then simply not build any frameworks for UIs that are good outside of JavaScript.

The reason for this isn’t Rust. It’s Chrome vs native Webviews. Chrome dominates in performance compared to WebView, but ultimately you’re still running a web app on your desktop.

Good luck with the thing! Its good news people are building web alternatives for desktop with the good stuff taken from the web. Btw have you seen GPUI? Original Electron authors (Atom guys) now Zed guys created it as a non-web based desktop UI framework. Currently its basically production ready UI solution for Rust.

@SogoCZE Heck ya! Very similar project it seems. Except I'm only targeting Linux so far. Never heard of Jai either. Looks cool

So fun to build every layer, from component system to rendered output. Learning a lot!

@mweinbach @SweetCornSeason @noxrsoex Even the original authors of Electron acknowledged that it was a mistake and created a non-web UI framework instead.

@SweetCornSeason @noxrsoex You speak with such confidence, and yet, you are wrong

You can tell the Claude app devs are only focused on macOS and not Windows, because they just hard code the Mac command symbol for Claude so I see it on Windows That would be so confusing if I didn’t know what it was lmao

@loveucifer @golok727 Jai is currently in close beta.

here's the first alpha release of uzumaki 🌀 native desktop apps with react. no electron, no webview. it's now opensource and i'd love help building this check it out at uzumaki [dot] run

@GregorySchier Do you implement you own GPU renderer or use something like Skia/Vello?

@SogoCZE 1. Build component tree 2. Convert to layout tree (sizes, etc) 3. Convert to scene (draw commands) 4. Render draw commands to canvas Render implementations for both Smithay (desktop shell) and wgpu (Wayland client apps)

Another iteration on my Rust UI framework. Adding in a contexts mechanism as we speak.

@golok727 Also haha: x.com/SogoCZE/status…

Cool! At the studio, we are developing a similar UI solution in Jai (GPU renderer, Flexbox-like layout engine...). For our use case, we like to keep the application code inside Jai as well, but I was thinking about making bindings to use it from React with Bun. Good luck with the project! Stuff like this has a chance to save us from web slop being everywhere. Btw: I think having a full-blown 2D vector renderer in the UI framework is beneficial, but overall you probably want to do text rendering via native platform APIs (macOS => CoreText, Windows => DirectWrite, Linux => FreeType) so the text blends in well on the given platform, and it's probably quite wasteful to rasterize text from Béziers on every frame. Btw 2: IME support is very hard to do right, but it's very important. Btw 3: Having support for an inline WebView is also very important for stuff like embedding a YT player, etc. Btw 4: A Canvas component with the same API as on the web is a very cool idea because, in theory, people can reuse graph libraries...

After 3 years, 47 releases, Ark VCS has finally reached 1.0! 🎉 youtu.be/XSnIw4siQ6U It's a big release, with features that I've never seen to any version control system out of the box, like built-in changelist build status. If you're tired of #perforce and #git, get it from ark-vcs.com! #gamedev #indiegamedev #softwaredevelopment

The most hardcore Jak & Daxter heads in the world have finished their native PC ports of the entire trilogy pcgamer.com/games/action/t…

@Dispatch_Graph Yeah C/C++ is here 40 years already and next 40 will be. Binding generator usually work pretty great with C and reasonably with C++ so you don't have to write manual bindings. I am using SDL3, Jolt, Slang, HarfBuzz, CoreText and more in Jai without noticeable friction.

@SogoCZE Ecosystem isn't as developed as C/C++... don't necessarily feel like making bindings myself, otherwise yeah I would've sticked to Jai

The more I work with C++ the more I realize how it's biggest flaw is the lack of a proper build system that works fine, feels fine, and works everywhere